Too Few Books, Too Many Books

"We should consider as well how many books have been destroyed because they weren't published. . . . how many books were left behind on the beach, in the subway, on a park bench. It's hard to respond to these disquieting thoughts, but the truth is that at this very moment, while you read these lines, at least one book disappears forever."

One person's fetishistic disquiet is another person's relief. Do all books deserve to be published and preserved? Even the lousy ones?

Larry McMurtry might dang well say, "Yup." As a lifelong book collector, scout and bookstore owner (and author of such whopping hit novels as Terms of Endearment and Lonesome Dove), McMurtry has scooped up everything from comics to pulp fiction to fine editions of Mark Twain to volumes of travel books written by women. Although he grew up in a bookless household during the Great Depression, he now owns a personal library of more than 28,000 volumes.

Don't expect to get much insight, however, into his passion for literature here. For a guy who's made a tidy living by storytelling, he can barely be bothered to exhale a narrative: Chapters run three pages long -- or fewer -- and the plotline of his reminiscences about booksellers he's known and customers he's served simply evaporates like spittle on a hot coal.

For some 36 years, McMurtry and his partner, Marcia Carter, ran Booked Up in Georgetown, a collectible and rare books shop that has since moved to Archer City, Tex. In the golden days of the store's tenure on M Street, Alice Roosevelt Longworth dropped in (for mysteries), and twice a year so did a guy with a ruler who'd measure books on the shelves and buy at least $2,000 worth of the smaller volumes. Then there was the day a homeless girl with a bloody foot turned up at the store. "We got her medical attention," recalls McMurtry, "and she easily survived, after which we learned that she was a descendant of Button Gwinnett, whose signature is the most elusive of all the signers of our Declaration of Independence."

Huh? If you've ever been a captive audience of free-form anecdotes on a plane ride, you know how exasperating the experience is. Such stories are not entertaining enough to merit the telling, and yet they contain so many narrative holes that they maddeningly nag at a listener or reader. How does one's descent from Button Gwinnett come up in casual conversation over a bloody foot? Since the girl was homeless, how does McMurtry even know her odd claim was reliable? And why, why, why is he filling up this slim memoir with such ephemera?

To be fair, McMurtry does tell one great yarn here about the day he was appraising a library in Northwest Washington and stumbled upon a working copy of The Whale, the English version of Moby-Dick. The copy turned out to have belonged to a minor English writer, Charles Reade, who took on the burden of abridging Moby-Dick for English audiences. Opening the volume, McMurtry saw that Reade took up his duties on page one: "He began his editorial work by drawing a bold line through 'Call me Ishmael.' "

If he had about 20 more anecdotes like that one, McMurtry would have been able to compose a nice little memoir about a life in books. No matter. As a brand-name bestselling author, he has probably already bought a few more truckloads of rare books to add to his library with the advance he received for this trifle. And if Fernando Báez is to be believed, the world would be the poorer if Books: A Memoir had never been published. ·

Maureen Corrigan is book critic for the NPR program "Fresh Air" and author of the literary memoir "Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading."