Paging all booklovers.

Long Beach boasts West Coast's biggest bookstore, with 6.5 miles of volumes

Hard by the sea in a hard town is a sanctuary in Long Beach, where used books, by the thousands upon thousands, speak gently. This refuge, appropriately titled Acres of Books, is the West Coast's biggest retail bookstore.

Outside, the homeless shuffle by, baleful glares and imploring glances backdropped by a shuttered Buffums, monument to dated retailing in a dying city core.

But inside there are six and a half miles of bookshelves sagging under 750,000 volumes, claims Jackie Smith, store manager for 17 years. If anything, it looks even bigger.

A sample volume: "Anecdotes of Public Men," printed in small type on now-fragile pages in 1873, by John Fornay. It starts off with a tale of Henry Clay visiting the "American Chestnut Inn, opposite Independence Hall" in Philadelphia, shortly after "the triumph of the Compromise measures."

Everywhere books -- virtually all hardback -- reach for the cavernous ceiling, stacked up 10 shelves high or more, on handmade wood slats, or old apple boxes, on any perch that can be fashioned.

Authors, great and ungreat or just unsung, line the shelves in bewildering profusion.

What author has the most pages in Acres of Books? "It might be Shakespeare, or it might be Isaac Asimov," answers Mark Real, the friendly bear of a man who's cashier. "I think we have more titles by Asimov, but more space is taken up by Shakespeare." Indeed there is an entire section on Shakespeare, enough to stock any library dozens of times over.

The collection in Acres of Books is so vast that swings of the American psyche are palpably chronicled. Thus, under a section emblazoned "Marriage," there is a hardback from 1964 entitled "How to Make Love in Five Different Languages" by Doris Lilly, who, we are breathlessly informed by the jacket cover, also wrote the bestseller "How to Marry a Millionaire."

And nearby is a book entitled "Open Marriage," from -- when else? -- 1972. Could America have changed that much since Lilly's book eight years earlier? Or, on second thought, perhaps one does naturally follow from the other.

Then again, marriage books from the 1980s seem to revolve around the concept of making a career work and achieving self-fulfillment, despite the twin nuisances of men and matrimony.

With so many volumes, Acres of Books has necessarily evolved categories, although not with the scientific rectitude of, say, the Library of Congress.

So, aisle B-9 is devoted to the works of Kafka and Camus, because "anybody who would read Kafka would read Camus," avers manager Smith. And there is a section, although now evidently abandoned, reserved for the works on Indian poet Rabindravath Tagore. "Oh, we probably received a whole load of books by him at one point, and created a section for him," explains Smith, flipping through a Rolodex of 400-odd sections. "But they are gone now."

With so many books and sections, it is perhaps inevitable that filing, at times, has a whimsical quality. And so in a section marked "Real Estate" replete with volumes on how to make a bundle, there is a thick tome from the University of New Mexico, entitled, "Proceedings, International Symposium on Wave Propagation and Dynamic Properties of Earth Materials." Well, that's one way to move real estate.

Most books are roughly priced at half the original cover price, although there are many exceptions. The vast majority of books are not collectibles, but are for regular readers and booklovers.

Anything the scale of Acres of Books invites superlatives. So here they are:

* The oldest book in the store is a Latin bible, from 1780.

* The smallest books are Lilliputian dictionaries, about one inch square.

* The biggest book is an Audubon Society tome on birds, 16 inches high, 12 inches wide and 3 inches thick.

* The most expensive book, a Bible, is $1,500.

* The least expensive books are 20-cent paperbacks for children.

* The biggest single sale was 30 box-loads of technical aviation books, to a fellow who sold his car to finance the purchase.

Buying books to keep the shelves stocked is an ongoing enterprise at Acres of Books and often requires the use of a truck, says Smith. Estate sales, bookstore liquidations and sales of private collections are good sources of books, she says. "But if you are selling books, you have to be selling more than will fit in your car, or we won't drive out," she warns.

Today's typical book buyer is someone between 30 years and 50, and Westerns, histories and mysteries "are hard to keep in stock," comments Smith.

Why spend 17 years working in a bookstore, even one so well-stocked as Acres of Books? "Well, I grew up in the sticks outside El Paso, and there were no other kids around," Smith relates. "Books are always there. You are never bored, you are never alone. You can put yourself in a book."