Jim Johnson, owner of Jim Johnson Nissan and Jim Johnson Hyundai automobile dealership, is well-known around Bowling Green as a philanthropist who generously supports and participates in a variety of worthy causes. He is a Western Kentucky University regent, serves on numerous boards, including The Salvation Army, and is a past chairman of the Warren County Public Library. Among the many honors Johnson has received for his activities in the community are the Jefferson Award for Public Service, the Lions Club Good Citizen Award and the WKU Volunteer Award.

Born in Morgantown, Johnson spent his teen years on the Canadian side of Lake St. Clair, near Belle River, Ontario, and in Detroit, where he later worked as a police officer and a federal agent with the U.S. Treasury Department. He attended Wayne State University, the University of Michigan and the Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania. In 1970, he returned to Kentucky and settled in Bowling Green to begin a career in the automotive business. He and his wife, Darlene, have two daughters, three granddaughters and a new great-grandson.

Johnson was taught to read phonetically as a young child and still remembers picture stories at Sunday school helping him learn reading concepts with ease. Later, to encourage his own children and grandchildren to love literature, he read aloud the beloved poem by Robert Service, “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” a tradition he will continue with his great-grandson. As a busy young father, he enjoyed Readers Digest Condensed Books, which led him to new titles and authors; nowadays, he loves to browse at Barnes & Noble, reads reviews in various newspapers and watches book programs on C-SPAN.

At the annual Southern Kentucky Book Fest, which he has helped sponsor since its inception, Johnson relishes meeting guest authors and buying their autographed works. He was delighted when featured author Lisa Scottoline, after chatting with him at last year’s Book Fest, bought and signed copies of her books, which she presented to him as gifts. Currently, Johnson is reading Ron Chernow’s “Alexander Hamilton,” a biography offering new insights into the thinking of our founding fathers’ view of government, banking and the Constitution; John Le Carre’s latest spy thriller, “Our Kind of Traitor”; and “Damn Right: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger,” by Janet Lowe.

Johnson usually reads three books at a time. He does not yet have an e-reader but plans to buy one this year. He enjoys history, biography, police and spy novels, and, as a pilot, both fiction and nonfiction about flying. He also appreciates cultural commentators such as Malcolm Gladwell, John Naisbitt and Alvin Toffler, and stays up to date with lots of business books. One of his favorite writers is local WKU history professor Carlton Jackson, whose “Joseph Gavi, Young Hero of the Minsk Ghetto,” the story of a Jewish boy who bravely resisted Nazi terror during World War II and later settled in Louisville, he particularly recommends. Other favorites over the years include Frederick Forsyth, Joseph Wambaugh, Stephen Mansfield, Oswald Chambers, Shakespeare and, above all, the Bible.

— Libby Davies, Barnes & Noble Booksellers