If you like to spend hours in used bookstores, you'll love Larry McMurtry's latest memoir, a rumination on how books have figured into his life -- reading them, writing them, but mostly selling them.

Or, more precisely, reselling them.

Most know McMurtry, as he puts it, "as a novelist whose books make excellent movies ... and as the author, along with my partner Diana Ossana, of the Oscar-winning adaptation of Annie Proulx' 'Brokeback Mountain.' "

		"BOOKS" By Larry McMurtry Simon & Schuster ($24)

Few know that before he began publishing novels, he was a bookseller, starting as a scout for other dealers.

In the early 1970s, just as he was working on the movie script of his novel, "The Last Picture Show," his first big hit, he acquired the stock of a defunct Washington, D.C., bookstore, then used those books to open Booked Up in the Georgetown neighborhood.

Forced out of Washington three decades later by rising rents, he moved the store's 300,000 books to his hometown of Archer City, Texas.

Now McMurtry owns six buildings around the square in that Texas city, five of them filled with books, the remnants of at least 26 bookshops.

Why did McMurtry get into selling books and, more intriguing, why did he continue to work as a bookseller even after he became rich and famous?

"I never wanted to be without books I wanted to read, and if I could be reading four or five books at the same time, so much the better," says McMurtry.

Oddly, according to McMurtry, a passion for reading is rare among book dealers. Most are in the trade for the thrill of the "get." Between his rambling stories about the used book business, McMurtry ponders the irony that a trade that has always been a bit eccentric itself is now supporting an act -- reading -- that has itself become somewhat of an eccentricity.

"What depressed me most in D.C. was that the various great houses I was invited to contained so few books," he writes.

In the 32 years he ran Booked Up, he only sold one real book to a member of Congress. "Senator Charles Mathias of Maryland bought a very fine Gibbon from us, and he read it." He also sold a $4 book on cartooning to Texas U.S. Rep. Bob Eckhardt.

McMurtry's anecdotes about the used book business are arcane at times.

"Why should (readers) even care that there exists a possibly unique copy of the dust wrapper of 'Anne of Green Gables?' " he wonders.

The answer, of course, is that good writers make us care. Helene Hanff did in her book, "84 Charing Cross Road" when she wrote about her correspondence with Frank Doel who worked for a bookshop called Marks & Co.

"Frank Doel was only doing what any professional bookman would do," says McMurtry, "but Ms. Hanff hit the nerve anyway."

Does McMurtry hit the nerve? For me, he does when he describes walking along the rows of bookshelves that make up his own 28,000-volume personal library, which he calls "one of his most notable achievements."

As he has grown older, his rapport with his books has changed. "I think sometimes I'm angry with my library because I know that I can't reread it all," he writes.

"I would like to, but the time is not there. It is this, I think that produces the slight sense of alienation that I feel when I'm together with my books now. They need to find other readers soon -- ideally they will be my son and grandson, but if not them, other book lovers."

You know, those people who like to wander into used bookstores.