Nothing In Dolly Parton’s Library Is Ever Returned

Robert Lee Parton never got to go to school.

He couldn’t read or write, and his daughter, Dolly Parton, said he carried a quiet sense of shame about it. She considered him one of the smartest people she knew, but her father came to believe a grown man could no longer learn to read.

Decades later, his experience helped inspire his daughter to create a library unlike almost any other.

Nothing in it is borrowed.

Nothing has a due date.

And nothing ever has to be returned.

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library sends a free book every month to registered children from birth until their fifth birthday. The book arrives by mail, addressed directly to the child, and belongs to that child permanently.

There is no income test and no library card. Families don’t have to drive anywhere to pick up the books.

A child enrolled at birth can have a personal collection of 60 books before starting kindergarten.

That ownership is central to the idea.

Public libraries provide access to books for millions of children, but having books at home can make a difference on its own. Researchers at New York University have found a connection between having books available at home and children’s reading achievement.

The problem is that access isn’t equal.

Research has also found that children’s books can be extremely scarce in the poorest neighborhoods.

Parton understood that problem from her own childhood.

She grew up in a large family in rural Tennessee, in a home where books were scarce. Apart from the Bible, there were none.

Her father’s experience stayed with her.

From One Tennessee County To Millions Of Children

Parton started the Imagination Library in 1995 in Sevier County, Tennessee, where she grew up.

The idea was simple: put books directly into children’s homes before they ever enter school.

Instead of asking families to buy the books, travel to a library or meet an income requirement, the program would mail them directly to the child.

The Dollywood Foundation manages the central operation and negotiates wholesale prices for the books.

Local partners make the system work in individual communities by raising money to cover the cost of books and postage for children in their areas.

That combination allowed what began as a local Tennessee project to spread far beyond Parton’s hometown.

The program went national in 2000.

Since its beginning, the Imagination Library has given away more than 300 million books.

About one in six American children younger than 5 is enrolled.

The scale is remarkable for a program built around such a small monthly event: one book showing up in a child’s mailbox.

But the books aren’t simply delivered to a household.

They arrive with the child’s name on them.

For a young child, that can make the package feel less like educational material being supplied by an organization and more like something that is personally theirs.

Over five years, those individual packages become a home library.

The Book Lady

The program’s connection to Parton’s father remained deeply personal.

Robert Lee Parton lived long enough to see the project begin and to watch his daughter’s idea grow beyond their home county.

He also lived long enough to hear children give her a new nickname.

They called her the “Book Lady.”

He died in 2000, the same year the Imagination Library expanded nationally.

The program continued growing after his death, eventually reaching millions of families and distributing hundreds of millions of books.

And its structure means the program is larger than the celebrity who created it.

The Dollywood Foundation continues the central work, while community organizations provide local financial support. Those partnerships keep books moving from publishers to mailboxes month after month.

That is also why the mailings did not stop when Dolly Parton died Aug. 25 at age 80.

She built the program to continue.

Its beginnings, however, remain tied to a father who never learned to read and a daughter who remembered what it meant to grow up without books in the house.

The Imagination Library is called a library, but it operates on almost the opposite principle of a traditional one.

Children don’t visit it.

They don’t check anything out.

They don’t have to remember a due date.

Instead, the library comes to them, one book at a time.

And every book stays.

For a child registered at birth, that can mean 60 books on a shelf by the time kindergarten begins—something Robert Lee Parton never had as a boy.

His daughter turned that absence into a program designed to make sure millions of other children would have something different.

Books of their own.