Most people probably know Larry McMurtry as the popular Texas author of "Lonesome Dove" and other best-selling novels.

But his true passion in life has been collecting and dealing used and rare books. After years of operating and expanding his antiquarian bookshop, Booked Up, in Washington, D.C., he moved the enterprise to his hometown of Archer City, near Wichita Falls. It now occupies several buildings there. Go to the store's Web site, bookedupac.com, for more details. Or, better yet, go to Archer City and see for yourself.

McMurtry describes his love for books in a new volume titled, simply, "Books: A Memoir" (Simon & Schuster, $24 hardcover).

I love books, but I'm not much into book collecting and don't begin to understand the antiquarian trade. Still, I found McMurtry's account of his life in books to be both captivating and inspiring.

McMurtry didn't grow up in a home with books. He was born in 1936 and lived on a ranch in his early years before the family moved to Archer City.

"I don't remember either of my parents ever reading me a story," he writes. "Perhaps that's why I've made up so many."

In 1942, a cousin, on his way to the war, "stopped by the ranch house and gave me the gift that changed my life," recalls McMurtry. "The gift was a box containing nineteen books."

Today McMurtry's personal library consists of 28,000 volumes, and Booked Up boasts around 400,000.

"Forming that library, and reading it," he says, "is surely one of the principal achievements of my life."

Early on as a novelist and screenwriter, McMurtry developed the habit of writing five manuscript pages a day. Later that would expand to 10 pages a day. Yet, he found, "When I'm writing I often spin out my daily pages as rapidly as possible, in order to get back to whatever I am reading."

The other detraction to his writing has been buying and selling books.

"What always bothered me most about writing was that it was sedentary," McMurtry observes. "I was born to working-class people. Getting up and then sitting down to peck at a strange machine didn't seem like work compared to what my father did.

"Book hunting, shelving, arranging, pricing was active. It was physically taxing, if we were moving a library but it always retained an intellectual dimension. Eventually book selling took more and more of my energies."

Nevertheless, McMurtry has found time to write 28 novels, more than 30 screenplays, and now 11 books of nonfiction.

Glenn Dromgoole writes about Texas books and authors and is co-owner of Texas Star Trading Co. in Abilene. Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.