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Books: A Memoir

By Jenny Shank, Special to the Rocky

Published July 17, 2008 at 6 p.m.

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In Books: A Memoir, Larry McMurtry confesses a lifelong addiction: bibliomania. It's a condition that has claimed a significant part of the money he's earned from his novels and screenplays.

Over the years, the author has purchased stock from many defunct shops to sell at his store, Booked Up, in Archer City, Texas. Through sheer passion for the printed word, he's turned Archer City into a book town on the model of Wales' Hay-on- Wye - a major accomplishment, considering that when McMurtry was growing up, Archer City didn't even have a public library.

In his memoir, McMurtry tells the story of how he became such a prominent "bookman." He bounces from one anecdote to the next in a charming, laid-back voice. And since his addiction doesn't claim as many victims as it once did, the memoir also serves in part as an elegy for his bookish way of life. McMurtry frequently offers shout-outs to fallen comrades and bookstores he's admired.

It wasn't clear from his early days that McMurtry was destined to become a devourer of books with a "carefully selected twenty-eight-thousand-volume library" and over 40 published titles to his credit, because, as he writes, "I don't remember either of my parents ever reading me a story - perhaps that's why I've made up so many. They were good parents, but just not story readers."

Born in 1936, McMurtry grew up in a Texas ranch house without a single book until 1942, when a cousin on his way to enlist in the military dropped off a box of 19 books. The collection featured "standard boys' adventure books of the thirties, on the order of Jerry Todd in the Whispering Cave or Poppy Ott and the Stuttering Parrot."

McMurtry's love of books grew from there, and during his 20s, when he was at Stanford on a Wallace Stegner writing fellowship, he became a scout for rare books, haunting secondhand shops in the area. He subsequently started a bookshop in Houston, then moved to Washington, D.C., where he founded the original Booked Up store with some partners, and his used-book trade began to take off.

This is the basic narrative underlying Books: A Memoir, but McMurtry doesn't tell it in a straightforward way. Instead, he creates a meandering, vaguely chronological structure, with short chapters that are full of amusing detail but that can leave readers a little confused about where McMurtry is in place and time.

In a typical chapter, McMurtry jumps from a mention of his casual childhood interest in comic books to the time he helped his grandson Curtis build a more focused comic collection when Curtis was a teenager, to when he was in his 40s and spent some time in Rome perusing fumetti noir, a graphic type of Italian comic book. McMurtry ended up purchasing many and, thus, became involved "with the international comic movement."

Books: A Memoir is best enjoyed for the tidbits McMurtry packs into his narrative (keeping close track of all the names he mentions would be too dizzying). McMurtry could have built many of his brief asides into full-blown stories, so it's no wonder he's had enough material to use in his writing over the years.

For example, there's the David family, a wealthy bunch of book-loving eccentrics that McMurtry knew during his time in Houston. They lived in a huge mansion, and McMurtry notes that when the patriarch of the family was drunk, he "was to be avoided," so his wife Grace "kept a bicycle by her bed, in case she needed to flee."

Then there's the tale of Austin bookseller Johnny Jenkins, who "had another identity, as a high-stakes poker player in Las Vegas, where he was known as Austin Squatty. Whether his death was suicide or murder I don't know, though someone must." That's all we hear of Austin Squatty, alas.

And there's another bookseller offed by a "crack-crazed killer," as well as a French writer and erotic-literature collector whom McMurtry subsidizes as he completes his more than 600-page erotic memoir, Peregrine Penis.

McMurtry's personal reflections are equally entertaining, such as his thoughts about how his "social viability rose and fell according to the success, not of [his] books, but of [his] movies."

When The Last Picture Show hit theaters, McMurtry writes that he was the toast of the town in D.C. among "people of status," who "began to ask me to dinner parties, usually mentioning that the dinner was very informal - I should just wear my Levi's." McMurtry reports that he always wore a suit, "which is what the other male guests were wearing."

Of course, McMurtry notably did wear jeans to pick up his Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Brokeback Mountain in 2006, which just goes to show that a bookman's prerogative is to change his mind.

McMurtry has hinted in the past that he might be ready to stop writing books and simply spend the rest of his days enjoying them.

"Eventually all novelists, if they persist too long, get worse," he writes. "No reason to name names, since no one is spared."

But the diverting Books: A Memoir proves that he still has a trove of stories left to tell.

Jenny Shank's fiction has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review and other journals. She writes about books for NewWest.net and lives in Boulder.

Books: A Memoir

* By Larry McMurtry. Simon & Schuster, 259 pages, $24.

* Grade: B+

Booked up indeed

There can't be much more room left on the shelves of McMurtry's store. The author's establishment in Archer City, Texas, holds nearly 400,000 used, rare and collectible books.