And the top choices were Ray Bradbury, Frederic Brown, Arthur Clarke, Clifford Simak, and Robert Sheckley in almost alphabetical order. I had a regular route that took me to the spinning book-racks of every drug store in the city (drug stores carried lots of paperback books in those days). The big event was finding a new Sheckley book (from Bantam as I recall) and I had them all, waiting month after month until a new one appeared. I still have those copies with pencil checkmarks I made next to the title of each story in the Table of Contents as I read them systematically. Those, too, were the days when I wrote little, amateur science fiction stories for the high school literary magazine. "Sheckley" was a faceless name on the front and spine and title page of a book that evoked something special..in an incorporeal way. The corpus, I suppose, was the book.

So that day of finding the newspaper, I got off the subway, walked home and propped up the folded open copy of "Big News" next to my computer---Sheckley information circled---with the intention of writing an e-mail to tell Mr. Sheckley, after all these years, how much I loved his stories.