One of the largest used bookstores in the country, Archer City’s Booked Up is getting slimmed down considerably with an auction this Friday. Novelist, screenwriter and bookseller Larry McMurtry wants to sell some 300,000 volumes of the store’s 450,000-book inventory because it’s just gotten too big to handle.

He also hopes the sell-off with prove an incentive to young booksellers who want to start out with their own stock. But as McMurtry tells NPR,  he’s not touching the good stuff, his personal, 25,000-volume library.