08/26/2026
Millions of parents still have a stack of these somewhere in the house. If your kids got one, you know exactly which shelf.
Each book came free in the mail, one a month, birth to age five. Dolly Parton started it decades ago, in her home county in Tennessee. Her own father never learned to read or write.
It grew to five countries and past 300 million books total. She died on August 25, 2026, at 80, thirty-one years after the first one went out.
The books are still going out every month.
