YOU too can own . . .

A. C. Greene’s personal library, complete and in toto, including rare copies of his own work, for ONLY $150,000!  Thousands of volumes, including a complete set of Greene’s own œuvre and many other important volumes of Texana and Americana with his handwritten marginalia!  (Collection for sale only en bloc; serious inquiries only.)

A. C. Greene is one of my absolute favorite Texas authors.  I read his first major (nationally released) book, A Personal Country, when it first came out in 1969; Mother had bought a copy for the library, read it, loved it, handed it to me.  I discovered that this was a man who was writing about the country where I grew up, the country where he had grown up, the kind people he and I had both known at each end of the same two-generation span . . . it was one of the first books I ever read that told me about myself and why and who I was.

I loved it.  I loved it enough that when I moved to Austin in 1975, I searched down a copy of the 1969 first edition—fortunately easy to do at the time, as it hadn’t been out of print long enough to be difficult.  Not long after, I scored a first edition of Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, another book that told How It Was about the place where I grew up.  The McMurtry has appreciated far more in the intervening years; a quick look on Bookfinder shows signed first printings of A Personal Country selling for $50 to $75, while a signed first of The Last Picture Show brings about $1,000.  (Yes, my copies of both books are signed.)

Since my copy is a signed first and I want to preserve its condition, I don’t read it all that often these days*—but I don’t need to.  The important parts of the book are part of me, and I carry them with me for always.

* There are books in my collectible Texana that I read regularly, most notably John Graves’s Goodbye to a River.  November doesn’t quite feel right if I don’t read it then.