In the move “The Shootist”, John Wayne plays a character named John Bernard Books (an aging, but still famous, gunfighter). It’s always struck me as a somewhat unusual name; I mean not what you’d typically expect for a movie gunfighter. And so I’m wondering where it came from. Is the name just totally made up, or is it the name (or similar to the name) of some real gunfighter?
I ran the name under a quick google search, and it only brought up the film, and a few John Wayne sites. I, too, have wondered if this person was real. Possibly he was based, or loosely based, on some real gunslinger of that era.
Anybody else have any info? I am curious about this myself.
The closest thing I could find about “facts” of this person was the Eonline facts of the movie, “The Shootist”.
Not what you needed, obviously.
Btw, Roadfood, welcome to the boards, from one newbie to another! 
Just guessing, but was this perhaps an ironic attempt by the scriptwriters to say that the legendary gunfighters of the Old West only existed in “books” and, later, movies? Wayne’s character in the context of the movie was a fairly ordinary man caught in the expectations of the public who knew of him only through the fictional “books” that had been written about him. In the end, he was forced by those expectations to participate in a gunfight scene in a manner that had probably never really happened to him before, and that, not his cancer, got him killed.
For more on this topic, watch “Unforgiven”.
The movie is pure fiction, but I’m guessing the Books character was very loosely based on the real-life gunfighter John Wesley Hardin.
This is wandering from the OP, but it’s interesting how you and I got very different things from that movie, especially the ending.
My take on the end was that he choose, very deliberatly, to die in the gunfight; to die as he had lived, so to speak. As the doctor told him: “I would not die a death like I just described. Not if I had your courage.” Books couldn’t let himself die in bed, screaming in agony. And he couldn’t take the “coward’s way out” by just putting a gun to his head. He needed help to commit suicide (perhaps he couldn’t even admit to himself that that was what he was doing), so he contacted those three guys, playing on their desire for revenge or their desire to make a name for themselves by killing the great gunfighter. In that way, his death could have at least some semblance of “honor”, by Books’ definition. Far from being forced into it by others, he specifically chose it as the only way he could accept as an end to his life.
And then, of course, the defining moment in the film, when the Ron Howard character picks up the gun and kills, and Books has the horrible realization that he just created another of himself, destined to go through the same lonely life that he led. But then, Ron throws the gun away, and Books nods in satisfaction; the kid is not going to follow in his path after all, and now, truly and finally, he can die in peace.
I don’t doubt that the character was based on a real-life gunfighter (or even more than one). But where did the name come from? “Books” and “Hardin” don’t seem at all related.