Larry McMurtry was a fascinating man with an endless supply of interesting stories. Few of them are here.

Like McMurtry, I'm a lifelong bibliophile. I've often thought that working in (or owning) a bookstore would be a congenial way of life, so you'd think this book would be for me. Instead, I find terseness and bare fact elevated at the expense of color and detail. McMurtry admits as much at the beginning of chapter 101 (yes, 101). "I've chosen, for the most part, to keep this memoir personality-free." McMurtry assumes that readers won't be interested in the quirks of fellow booksellers who have since died, and instead fills the books with anecdotes about bookstores he's visited, the books he bought there, what he paid for them, and what he sold those books for later. At times he shows signs of momentary self-doubt. "Here I am, thirty-four chapters into a book that I hope will interest the general or common reader—and yet why should these readers be interested in the fact that in 1958 or so I paid Ted Brown $7.50 for a nice copy of The Anatomy of Melancholy? How many are going to care that I visited the great Seven Gables Bookshop, or dealt with the wily L.A. dealer Max Hunley, whose little store at the corner of Rodeo Drive and Little Santa Monica in Beverly Hills is now a yogurt shop?" The fact is that I might have been interested in these dry-sounding incidents—if McMurtry had chosen to flesh them out the way he would flesh out a character or an incident in one of his excellent novels.

This book is a bore, and I'm so disappointed. ( )

I've read several of Larry McMurtry's novels, and definitely like his son James' music, and I am also a bibliophile. So you could say, I guess, I was heavily predisposed to enjoy this book. And enjoy it I did, and read it in one compulsive gulp today. Over the years I was aware that Mr. McMurtry was involved in the antiquarian book trade, and in fact operated near the top of the hierarchy in that world. This book, as the title indicates, is a chronicle told as memoir (time, in other words, shifts and is disjointed) of the life of Booked Up, the bookstore McMurtry operates. As with most books of this type (see A Gentle Madness by Nicholas Basbanes), the story here is one of the personalities--many of them, uh, idiosyncratic and eccentric--involved in this world, as well as the perils and rewards of doing business with them. If you are not a bibliophile or book scout, this book, as other reviewers have suggested, will probably read as an account of someone else's (albeit a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who writes engagingly) trips to rummage sales. If you are a bibliomane of any sort, then I expect you will find, as I did, this an exciting and highly readable book.

I love books about books. ( )

An excellent little history of Larry McMurtry’s life as a bookseller and a reader. I find myself intensely jealous that he has been able to build a life that allows him to indulge his love of books, the book trade, and reading. (I speak as someone who dreams of living in a library.) Very enjoyable with lots of information about the book trade as he knew it. ( )

In an intimate and intriguing memoir, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove recounts his lifelong love affair with books, from his largely "bookless" boyhood and discovery of literature as a young man, to the evolution of his writing career and his passion as a book collector who opens bookstores of rare and collectible volumes. 75,000 first printing.