By the time Dolly Parton died on Aug. 25, 2026, her Imagination Library had gifted more than 332 million children’s books to babies and kids in all 50 states and four other countries: Canada, the U.K., Australia and Ireland.
If they were set end to end, these books would circle the earth 1.8 times.
This free program mails an age-appropriate book monthly to each enrolled child from birth to age 5, meaning up to 60 books will fill these children’s shelves by the time they graduate from the program. [The Hopkinsville-Christian County Public Library oversees a local Imagination Library program.]
Though a selection committee tweaks the lists annually, each participant receives Watty Piper’s “The Little Engine That Could” as their first book and Nancy Carlson’s “Look Out Kindergarten, Here I Come!” as their last.
- RELATED: The example Dolly Parton leaves us
I’m an information science professor who studies reading behavior. In my research for an upcoming academic article about the Imagination Library, I’ve found that its free monthly books help families develop children’s literacy, prepare children for kindergarten and encourage a lifelong love of reading.
Emphasis on early literacy
Parton, most remembered as a popular country singer, embraced many musical genres during her long and successful career in show business. She was also a songwriter, entrepreneur, actor and philanthropist.
She created this program because she, like most early childhood literacy experts, believed that reading begins in the home. That is, parents and other guardians are a child’s first teachers, and reading aloud to children contributes to their future literacy.
First-graders who struggle with reading usually continue to have trouble with literacy later on.
Very young children in lower-income households generally have less access to books and hear fewer words than higher-income kids. This class-based difference may lead to disparities in reading skills later on.
A homegrown program
Like Parton, who was born in a one-bedroom cabin in an Appalachian region of Tennessee that had neither running water nor electricity, the Imagination Library’s origins were modest. It started in her hometown, hardscrabble Sevier County, in late 1995. Its initial order of 1,760 books was destined for the children who lived where she grew up.
The program came from “a very serious place in my heart,” Parton once said. On many occasions, she emphasized how her own father’s illiteracy inspired her to found it — with him.
“Daddy couldn’t read nor write, and it always just seemed to cripple him, and he was embarrassed about it,” Parton told American Libraries in 2018. “My daddy just loved it when all the little kids would call me ‘The Book Lady,’” she said later.
In contrast, Parton was a bookworm. “I always loved books,” she explained in an interview. “I don’t remember learning to read, it was just something I always did. That’s how I knew there was a world beyond the Smoky Mountains.”
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
An associate professor at Drexel University’s College of Computing & Informatics (CCI), Alex H. Poole studies archives and records management, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), information work and information practices, digital curation and digital humanities.
