booked

Leah and I made the two hour drive north to Archer City to Larry McMurtry's shop, Booked Up. It has passed its days of grandeur (two of the four buildings have closed, shuttered up, and one of the remaining two was eerie, like something out of the Walking Dead, things left half finished, desks left as if someone had been sitting there moments ago, yet the building was completely empty, and hot; very, very hot). Granted, in their remaining large warehouse, they still had an overwhelming hundred thousand (plus) volumes following the great Last Book Sale, mostly because it seems the auction didn't garner much interest, or at least not enough as they had hoped, perhaps. A pretty sad sight, though--kind of a metaphor for the little town itself, literally in the middle of nowhere. Our friend Kathryn had made the journey almost two years ago, and the place has gone downhill since then. Even the cafe that McMurtry mentions in that excerpt above, The Wildcat Cafe, we found had gone out of business, along with a few other antique stores and shops in that little square there. A sad sight, these country Texas villages--we drove through a half dozen to get here. The people are friendly, ardent about life, but you have to wonder how they deal with all this, with their little city dying all around them in the 103 degree Texas sun.
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better in large?