Jay’s far from a literary scholar, or even a learned one, but he got it honest. He’s not from a literary family, really, and certainly not from a family of journalists, though he’s always loved newspapers and periodicals, as well as books. Jay’s father, orphaned at nine or so, didn’t make it past Rochester’s Fifth Grade. Jay’s Sainted Mother was educated in South Carolina, as was Jay, which says a whole lot right there without dwelling too much on the nitty gritty of the matter. She trudged miles from her parents’ farm to Windsor, South Carolina, when school was only eleven grades. She graduated - the first in her family to hold a high school diploma - and packed off to Columbia, the state’s capital, to attend secretarial school.

Throughout Jay’s childhood, if you could call it that, the household contained maybe two dozen books, all bibles, biblical

storybooks, and other trappings of Southern Baptistness. A relative had handed down a ten-volume set of baby raising books, not one of which, on Jay’s meticulous inspection when such matters became of interest, contained any reference to how babies were occasioned in the first place.

Along about Elementary School time, Jay’s parents wisely sprung for a set of World Book Encyclopedia when the salesman came to call. When Jay became interested in non-biblical literature along about Junior High School, they subscribed to Life, Look, the Reader’s Digest Books and the Book-of-the-month club. Nice as they were, none of those volumes contained...  Well, you know.

Jay discovered fiction in junior high school. They call that “middle school” now, not necessarily complimentarily. He read voraciously, though sporadically, establishing a tradition of reading absolutely everything by a given author and then moving on to someone else. Among Jay’s favorites were Arthur Conan Doyle, Earle Stanley Gardner, and Agatha Christie (sensing a theme here?). Though Aiken had a decent library, Jay always preferred to buy books, and keep them for later reference after devouring them. Enough with the third person. Just let Jay tell it.

Actually, I was never entirely comfortable in libraries, with all the shushing and the necessity of treading lightly on squeaky floors so as not to incur frowns from imperious librarians. The real problem was, however, that once I returned the books I didn’t have them anymore, in case I wanted to reread some passage I’d enjoyed. Oh, and that other problem: the librarians would know what I was interested in, and reading, and not necessarily approve, and potentially cause a stink if they didn’t. Not so with store clerks, who were much younger and didn’t look at anything but the cover price to ring up the sale.

My collection grew, and I printed a bunch of Ex Libris plates (on my own letterpress printing press, a story for later chapters) to distinguish treasured volumes. I accumulated books for decades, in spite of disasters that wiped out my collection several times. Although I again have lots of books, with Internet searching at my fingertips I rarely need to look up anything on actual paper. But I like having them.