I Like Big Books

If you work in Texas tourism, you must know your stuff. And if you know your stuff, you know that the newest public library in Kerrville is called the Butt-Holdsworth Memorial Library.

If you really know your stuff, you learned this on a touring motorcoach with 21 other Texas tourism professionals as fellow-travelers, and every single one of you dissolved into a giggling puddle of unprofessionalism upon learning this news.

The library is named in honor of the prominent Butt family (You back there! Stop your snickering! I heard you), which founded the H-E-B grocery chain. Here I hasten to add that I'm a huge (stop it!) fan of H-E-B. The selection is excellent, particularly of organic and locally produced food. I buy pasture-raised eggs there. They sprung from a Central Texas farm! Your anaconda is gluten-intolerant? No problem, hon! Frankly, I have no idea why Austin even bothered to get a Trader Joe's, which features a limited, lower-quality selection and much higher prices. I guess it makes sense in Bug Tussle or Cut-n-Shoot or West Lake Hills (all they had before was Randall's).

Caveat emptor.

H-E-B is the eponym of one Howard E. Butt, from Kerrville. Howard liked big business, and he could not lie: after he took over his mother Florence's small-town operation, it expanded - as does sometimes happen over the years - into a market as wide as Texas. Howard married the extraordinarily civic-minded Mary Elizabeth Holdsworth. They had children. And the Butts just got bigger.

Butts are everywhere nowadays, of course; you can't turn around without just missing one. So it's fitting that one of Kerrville's most important public institutions would be named for such important citizens. The Butt-Holdsworth Library is a great place to visit. They have public computers, so it's a great place to do some surfing.

And when your friends ask you how many books you checked out at the library, you can tell them:

"Dude! I got a Butt-Holdsworth!"