Whether you knew Jim Abbott as the paper man or know him as a friend (or both), this is a wonderful opportunity to visit and hear fascinating stories from his new book. Told in anecdote-rich vignettes, Paper Man chronicles Abbott’s front-row seat to history and his encounters — in church pews and grocery-store aisles — with the very characters he wrote about each week.

Columnist Sid Salter wrote, “A son of the Mississippi Delta, Jim Abbott was no crusading interloper. He was a Mississippian who knew which political and social anthills not to kick — yet he kicked them anyway because they needed to be kicked.”

During Abbott’s rich life, he crossed paths with likes of James Meredith, Walt Disney, Duke Ellington, Robert Kennedy, B.B. King, Brooke Shields, Craig Claiborne, Pops Staples, John Fogerty, and Gene Hackman, among many more.

Ralph Eubanks, author of When It’s Darkness on the Delta, said, “Jim Abbott’s Paper Man is the story of one man’s love of the Delta and Mississippi, a love he professed by bravely practicing journalistic integrity as well as human kindness.”

Paper Man takes the reader from the Ole Miss riot to the jungles of Vietnam and from hiking the Grand Tetons to a deserted, post-Katrina New Orleans, but it is Abbott’s years behind the editor’s desk in Indianola that gives the book its greatest charm — and its lasting lessons about the power and the necessity of local journalism.