Here's What to Expect at Larry McMurtry's 300,000-Volume “Last Book Sale.”

Larry McMurtry comments on the McMurtry 100:

"Historically the highest compliment one bookseller can pay another is to say that he or she has interesting books; this implies, of course, that there can be uninteresting books.

“Having interesting books has been the raison d'etre of Booked Up Inc. these forty years. We are not highspotters, although of course we have sold most of the big books by Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Joyce, Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Waugh and the like before they matured, as it were.

“Our distinction, if we have one, is not how many good books we have, but how few bad books infiltrate our stock. For bad books sift in like dust; only frequent purges can rid the stock of them; and we do purge, savagely. And cherry-picking this stock doesn't work: too few sleepers and too many good books. To prep the bidders a little I strolled around the shelves for half an hour and piled up 100 books that are both interesting and appealing. See what you think!"

#831: Algernon Charles Swinburne. Poems and Ballads. London, 1899.

#832: Anthony Lippmann. Divinely Elegant: The World of Ernst Dryden. Great Britain, 1989. Forward by (and signed by) Billy Wilder.

#833: Roger Troy Peterson (Intro), Joseph Kastner (text). The Bird Illustrated. 1550-1900. New York, 1988.

#834: Dorthy Shakespear Pound. Etruscan Gate. (edited by Moelwyn Merchant), Exeter, 1971.

#835: J.M. Synge. Playboy of the Western World. Barre, 1970 (edited by Stanley Sutton, brush paintings by Louis le Brocquy).

#836: Pierre Michaut. Le Ballet Contemporain 1929-1950. Paris, 1950.

#837: Lady Jackson. The First of the Bourbons. Two Volumes. London, 1890.

#838: George Meredith. Lord Ormont and His Aminta. Three Volumes. London, 1894.

#839: Anthony Trollope. The Last Chronicle of Barset. Two Volumes. London, 1847.

#840: Algernon Charles Swinburne. Chasteland. London, 1878.

#841: Eden Phillpotts. The Mother. Illustrated by Gunning King. London, 1908.

#842: F. Dostoieffskaya. The Emigrant. Introduction by Stephen Graham, and translated by Vera Margolies. London, 1916.

#843: Ben Jonson. Volpone. Paris, 1906.

#844: Cyril W. Beaumont. Markova, Essays on Dancing & Dancers. #8. London, 1935.

#845: Gertrude Stein. Tender Buttons. Objects. Food. Rooms. New York: 1914.

#846: Elmore Leonard. The Bounty Hunters. Boston, 1954. First book, in dust-wrapper.

#847: J.P. Donleavy. The Ginger Man. (The Traveller’s Companion Series, #7). Wrappers. Paris:

#848: La Foutromanie. Parapilla. Paris.

#849: Peter Matthiessen. In The Spirit of Crazy Horse. New York, 1983.

#850: Alice B. Toklas. Autobiography. Illustrated. New York, 1933. Signed.

#851: Carver Adelman. Carver Country: The World of Raymond Carver. New York, 1990.

#852: Walter Dyk. A Navajo Autobiography. New York, 1947.

#853: Gertrude Stein. Narration. Chicago, 1935. Intro. By Thornton Wilder.

#854: Tony Hillerman. The Ghostway. London, 1985. First English Edition, first book.

#855: Louise Bogan. Body of this Death. New York, 1923. First book.

#856: Henry James. Notes of a Son and Brother. New York, 1914. Illustrated.

#857: Henry James. The American Scene. London, 1907. First edition, sold with the colonial edition as well.

#858: Henry James. Within the Rim: Essays 1914-15. London, 1918.

#859: Jacques Lassaigue. Chagall. France, 1957.

#860: M. T. F. My Chinese Marriage. New York, 1921. Katherine Anne Porter.

#861: Christina Stead. The Man Who Loved Children. New York, 1940.

#862: W.H. Hudson. The Land’s End. London, 1908.

#863: Sir Samuel W. Baker. Wild Beasts and Their Ways. Two Volumes. London, 1890.

#864: Stanley Vestal. Warpath....A Biography of Chief White Bull. Boston, 1934.

#865: Hugh M’Diarmid. Penny Wheep. Edinburgh, 1926.

#866: John McPhee. The Headmaster: Frank Boyden, of Deerfield. New York, 1966.

#867: T. G. Tucker. Life in the Roman World (of Nero & St. John). New York, 1928.

#868: Joseph Pernell. Aubrey Beardsley and Other Men of the Ninties. Philidelphia, 1924. Copy # 9 of 100.

#869: Rafinesque, Walom Olom. The Migration Legend of the Lenni Lenape of Deleware Indians. Indianapolis, 1954.

#870: Alfred Edward A’Courte Hudson. Selected Blood Studies on Swine. Raleigh, 1951.

#871: Lorin Blodget. Climatology of the United States. Philadelphia, 1857.

#872: Karl Grober. Toys of Bygone Days. London, 1928.

#873: Frank Lloyd Wright. A Testament. New York, 1957.

#874: Andrew Lang. Aucassin and Nicolete in English. New York, 1931.

#875: Norman Douglas. Experiments. N.p., 1925. #151 of 300.

#876: The California Palace of the Legion of Honor. Contemporary American Sculpture. San Francisco, 1929.

#877: Gerald M. Durrell. The Overloaded Ark. London, 1953. Illustrated.

#878: Francois Mauriac. Woman of the Pharisees. New York, 1946. Translated by Gerald Hopkins.

#879: George Augustus Sala. Paris Herself Again in 1878-1879. Two Volumes. London, 1880.

#880: Henry James. Partial Portraits. London, 1888.

#881: Henry James. The Reverberator. London/New York, 1888.

#882: Cherry Kearton. In the Land of the Lion. New York, 1929.

#883: Anthony Trollope. North America. London, 1869.

#884: Ada Lawrence & G. Stuart Gelder. Early Life of D. H. Lawrence. London, 1932.

#885: Howells & Alden. Quaint Courtships. London, 1906.

#886: Henry Nevinson. Essays in Freedom. London, 1911.

#887: Frederick Gerstacker. Western Lands and Western Waters. London, 1864.

#888: Frances Anne Kemble. Journal of a Resident on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839. London, 1863.

#889: Thomas Wolfe. The Web and the Rock. London, 1947.

#890: William Everson. The Residual Years. New York, 1948.

#891: William J. Lederer. Ensign O’Toole and Me. New York, 1957.

#892: Ada Earland. John Opie and His Circle. London, 1911.

#893: M. Valery. Voyages En Italie: Du Voyageur Et De L’Artiste. Bruxelles, 1844.

#894: Frederic William Maitland. The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen. London, 1906. First appearance of Virginia Woolf.

#895: Captain Mayne Reid. The Cliff-Climbers or the Lone Home in the Himalayas. New York, 1882. Original cloth.

#896: James R. Anderson. An Actor’s Life. London, 1902.

#897: Anthony Trollope. Australia and New Zealand. Two Volumes. London, 1873.

#898: Alfred Perles. Reunion in Big Sur: A Letter to Henry Miller.....1959. #23 of 500, signed by author.

#899: Shane Leslie. Studies in Sublime Failure. London, 1932.

#900: Axel Lundquist. Andersen, Dansk Sportsleksekon. Two Volumes. Copenhagen, 1944.

#901: A. Henry Savage-Landor. Across Unknown South America. Two Volumes. LDN/NY/TOR, 1913.

#902: John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, First Baron Acton. Historical Essays and Studies. London, 1919.

#903: Winston Churchill. A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Four Volumes. London, 1957.

#904: Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace. Three Volumes. New York, 1904.

#905: Arno Schmidt. Evening Edged in Gold: A Fairytale Farse. New York, 1980.

#906: Duane Michals. Eros and Thanatos. Sante Fe, 1992.

#907: William Everson and Leigh Wiener. The High Embrace. Los Angeles, 1986. #76 of 190, signed by author, photographer and designer.

#908: Sotheby’s. The Estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. April 23-26, 1996. New York, 1996.

#909: Basil S. Long. A History of British Minaturists 1520-1860. London, 1929.

#910: Robert Southey. Curse of Kehama. London, 1810.

#911: Cargil Gilston Knott. Life and Scientific Work of Peter Guthrie Tait. Cambridge, 1911.

#912: Sir Lascelles Wraxall, Bart. And Robert Wehran. Memoirs of Queen Hortense, Mother of Napoleon III. London, 1864.

#913: Paul Scott. Six Days in Marapore. Garden City, 1953.

#914: Clancy Sigal. Going Away: A Memoir. Boston, 1962.

#915: Maynard and Bray. The Plays of Euripides. Volume II, Greynog Press, 1931. Gilbert Murry translation, illustrated.

#916: Humphrey Milford. Portraits of Dr. William Harvey. London, 1913.

#917: Brother Antoninus. Who Is She That Looketh Forth As The Morning. Santa Barbara, 1972.

#918: Historical Publishing Co. The Fighting Men of Texas – A History of the Second World War. Vol. 5. Dallas, 1948.

#919: Florent Fels. L’Art Et L’Amour. Paris, 1953.

#920: Dr. Washington Matthews. The Human Bones of the Hemenway Collection in the United States Army Medical Museum. Washington, n.d.

#921: Rulka Langer. The Mermaid and the Messerschmitt. New York, 1942.

#922: Maud Allan. My Life and Dancing. London, 1908.

#923: John Davidson. Self’s the Man. London, 1901.

#924: Frank O’Conner. Traveller’s Samples: Stories and Tales. London, 1951.

#925: George Saintsbury. A Scrap Book. London, 1922. Together with A Last Scrap Book. London, 1924. Two Volumes both signed by author.

#926: John Gardner and L.M. Rosenberg, ed. MSS: Spring 1981. Dallas, 1981.

#927: Radhakamal Mukerjee. The Dynamics of Morals: A Sociopsychological Theory of Ethics. London.

#928: Thomas Carlyle. Past and Present. London, 1843.

#929: Herbert Gilchrist, ed. Annie Gilchrist, Her Life and Writings. London, 1887.

#930: F.A. Mitchell-Hedges. Land of Wonder and Fear. London, 1931.

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Here's What to Expect at Larry McMurtry's 300,000-Volume “Last Book Sale.”

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