Dolly Parton Put a Book in the Post Every Month for Thirty Years

Dolly Parton died on Tuesday, in Nashville, at 80. Her publicist said it was cancer, and that it was brief, and that she went peacefully.

Everyone is writing about the songs, and they should. I want to write about the post.

The thing she actually built

In 1995 she started mailing free books to children in Sevier County, Tennessee, where she grew up. One book a month, from the day a child is born until they turn five and start school. The programme pays for the book and the postage. It does not means-test anybody, which is a decision worth sitting with for a second: a rich family and a broke family on the same street get the same parcel on the same day, and no child has to be identified as the one who needed it.

It runs in five countries now. The United States from 1995, Canada from 2006, the United Kingdom from 2007, Australia from 2013, and the Republic of Ireland from 2019.

The reach is the part I keep going back to. The Imagination Library reaches one in six American children under the age of five.

Not one in six of some enrolled group. One in six of them.

Why she did it, which she said plainly

Her father, Robert Lee Parton, could not read or write. By her account he was ashamed of it, and the shame bothered her more than the illiteracy did.

In a video statement in 2024 she put it in one sentence: "I created the Imagination Library as a tribute to my daddy."

She had every option available to a person with her money, and what she chose was to send a book to a stranger's child, every month, for thirty years, in her father's name. Her own framing of the point is on the programme's site and it is better than any summary of it:

"When I was growing up in the hills of East Tennessee, I knew my dreams would come true. I know there are children in your community with their own dreams. They dream of becoming a doctor or an inventor or a minister. Who knows, maybe there is a little girl whose dream is to be a writer and singer. The seeds of these dreams are often found in books and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world."

How many books

Two numbers are in circulation and they do not match, so here are both.

The programme's own website says it passed its 200 millionth book in 2023, and that it mails about 2 million books a month, as of 2022. Reporting published this week says the total is now more than 332 million.

Those are not rival claims. The organisation's own page is simply behind, which is what happens to an about page when the people who would update it are busy posting books.

If you want one number that is worth more than any cumulative total, use the one in six. A total accumulated over thirty years grows whether or not the thing is still working. A share of living five-year-olds only stays high if the machine is still running this morning.

It is still running

The part that got to me, reading the coverage: a spokesperson for the Dollywood Company confirmed this week that the Imagination Library will keep sending books to eligible children in her absence.

She built something that did not need her to be alive.

That is a rarer achievement than it sounds. An enormous amount of celebrity philanthropy is a person standing next to a cheque. This is a logistics operation with local partners in five countries, and a child enrolled in it last month will get a parcel next month, and the month after that, and will never think about where it came from. Which is the point. The best version of this kind of work is invisible to the person it is done for.

The floor everything else here stands on

Everything else on this site assumes you already read.

Every page on this site is written for somebody deciding between a hardback and a recording, or working out whether a narrator suits them, or asking whether a book is worth thirty hours. All of that is a conversation among people for whom books are a given. Reading is the floor we are standing on while we argue about the furniture.

Parton spent thirty years working on the floor. Her father was a smart man who could not read, and she took the obvious lesson from it, which is that the ability to sit down with a book is not distributed by merit and never has been. One in six American toddlers currently gets a parcel because she noticed that.

She was not a literary figure. She did not, as far as I know, have opinions about narrators. But the number of people who can read the reviews on this site is measurably larger because of a decision she made in 1995 about her dad, and I would rather say so this week than let it pass as a footnote under the songs.

If you want to do something about it, the Dollywood Company has asked that people donate to the Imagination Library to honour her. You can also check whether the programme runs in your area, because it operates through local partners and coverage is patchy by design rather than universal.

Somebody put a book through a letterbox for thirty years. That is the whole obituary I wanted to write.