You would think that prolific Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry, author of 28 novels and the creator of such high-profile works as The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove, and the screenplay of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain (with Diana Ossana), would have enough to keep him occupied. You might think that he wouldn’t have the time or inclination to — after years of traveling and scouting general and genre books, and buying antique and collectible tomes — own and operate his final bookstore in his hometown of Archer City, Texas, where he has nearly 400,000 used and rare books.

It’s a long way to that enormous stock, and McMurtry’s private library of 28,000 books, from the original 19 boys' adventure volumes given to him by a cousin shipping out during World War II. And it wasn’t long before that small shelf of books would grow and become the impetus for McMurtry’s eventual love for the book, its physicality and design - the type, binding, and heft. Subsequently, says McMurtry “the bibliography seduced me. I acquired Jacob Blanck’s American First Editions and lost myself, for a time, in the intricacies of issues, points, cancels, colophons, and the rest.”

But from that small beginner’s collection of books, too, it didn’t take long for McMurtry to know — despite the lack of books and storytelling in his immediate family — that “reading very quickly came to seem what I was meant to do.” The eagerness for self-education and amusement became a motivating force, whether the industrious boy knew it at the time, for some resourceful scouting smarts and multitasking tendencies that would serve him well in his future vocational endeavors. Once McMurtry reached driving age he started roaming the dirt roads of Archer County looking for some of the many abandoned farmhouses that had failed during the Dust Bowl years. “Now and then,” McMurtry writes, “I would find a few books in those houses - they weren’t much, but I was firmly started on my book hunting.”

He was quickly keen to take his intellectual and tactile fascination with books to such arenas — often in league with business partner Marcia Carter — as scouting, antiquarian book selling, appraising, auctions, bookstore ownership, and the Internet (though not so quickly keen here). And because one of the purposes of writing Books is to “raise ghosts - often long-absent ghosts,” which McMurtry does with such immediacy and intimacy, we can’t help but feel the vicarious excitement and apprehension of the various times and places.

McMurtry enjoyed his book scouting days, reminiscing about them, replete with the romantic lore and legendary tales of scouts of yore. After all, scouts are able to roam, being “the seed carriers, a vital link to the food chain of book selling,” while open-shop dealers are often tied to a cash register more than they would like. Still, McMurtry as a bookstore owner had his share of memorable eccentrics, such as the “little book man” who came in with a ruler to measure books, and only bought short ones — always spending at least $2000 each visit — regardless of title. And then there was the time that McMurtry, who sometimes found himself arbitrarily setting prices for unfamiliar and possibly valuable books, was shaken out of his make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach by an expert passer-by who happened along and was able to enlighten him about the Dod Grile book he was about to price, The Fiend’s Delight - which was actually Ambrose Bierce’s first book, and worth considerably more than the $15.00 it was about to be priced at.