Ian Jackson was born in Montréal in 1951 on a street named after a poet, the rue Alfred de Musset, but has lived for more than 40 years in Berkeley, where he has  been selling antiquarian and scholarly books privately since 1972. His articles, book reviews and obituaries have appeared in Landscape, Fine Print, North American Pomona, Garden History, The Bookplate Journal, The Book Collector, Petits Propos Culinaires, Archives of Natural History, Pacific Horticulture, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Conférence, Taxon and Belfagor. If pressed for a self-description, he usually calls himself an erudite (or Epicurean) humorist. He maintains that all erudite humor — from the works of François Rabelais (La Dive Bouteille) and Thomas Love Peacock (Dr. Opimian) to Flann O’Brien (“a pint of plain is your only man”) —  is alcohol-based, and therefore has agreed to display himself to the public as an Old Salt with a bottle of Old Suntory, dated 1965, the gift of a friend, who had found it under his house. ​