The Book Lady
Of all the ways that Dolly Parton will be remembered, music legend, celebrity icon, or Queen of Country, the title she most enjoyed was the “Book Lady.” Dolly Parton died Tuesday in Nashville after a brief battle with cancer. She was 80.
The rhinestones, the wigs and the voice that could shatter glass or mend a broken heart, will endure in the catalog of music she left behind. But the monument that will hopefully outlast every chart-topper song, every movie credit, and every sequined gown will be a simple package delivered by mail. Specifically, to the mailboxes of millions of children who were too young to know her name but who received, month after month, a gift addressed to them before they were born.
In 1995, Parton launched the Imagination Library, mailing free books to children from birth until they turn five and enter kindergarten. That gift was a tribute to her father, who could not read or write. According to Dolly, “He was one of the wisest men I’ve ever known, but I knew in my heart this inability to read probably kept him from seeing all his dreams come true.”
What began in Sevier County, Tennessee, grew into something almost impossible to hold in the mind as a single number. By her death, the Imagination Library had gifted more than 330 million books to more than 3 million children across the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, and Australia. At its peak, approximately one in seven children under the age of five in the United States received a monthly book through the program.
How many children did she reach across three decades? Accounting for the program’s growth from a single county to five countries, a reasonable estimate places the number of individual children enrolled over the program’s lifetime somewhere between 15 and 20 million. Each child received up to 60 books, one per month, from birth to kindergarten.
How many of those children became avid readers? Research on early childhood literacy consistently shows that regular book exposure in the first five years is among the strongest predictors of reading achievement and a lifelong reading habit. If even a quarter of the children who passed through the Imagination Library carried that love of books into adulthood, a conservative estimate, would mean that Dolly Parton quietly built a readership of four or five million people who might otherwise never have found their love of reading.
That is not a footnote to a music career. That is a civilization-level act of generosity.
In lieu of flowers, her family is asking for donations to the Imagination Library. It is still running. The books are still going out. The program she built will keep arriving in mailboxes long after the rhinestones have stopped glittering from the stage. She wanted to be known as the Book Lady, and to millions of children around the world she will be.
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