Somewhere in Denver, a small child called her The Book Queen. In Alabama, she was Ms Dolly. And in Australia, a toddler who had struggled to find her first word finally said it — orange — after a free picture book about colours arrived in the post, delighting her family and her twin sister in equal measure. The woman behind all of this, Dolly Parton, who died this week at the age of eighty, never seemed to think of herself as a philanthropist.

She thought of herself as a daughter. Parton launched Imagination Library in 1995 in Sevier County, Tennessee — the very hills where she had grown up — as an act of quiet tribute to her father, a man whose impoverished Appalachian childhood had left him unable to read or write. He was, she once wrote in an open letter, the smartest man she had ever known, and yet she believed, with a certainty that clearly never left her, that his illiteracy had quietly narrowed the boundaries of his life. That conviction became her mission.

One free book a month, mailed to every enrolled child from birth to the age of five, was her answer to it. What began in a single Tennessee county expanded to the whole of the United States by 2000, then to Canada, Britain, Australia and Ireland over the following two decades. By the programme's thirtieth anniversary in 2025, more than three hundred million books had been distributed — one every seventy-eight seconds, by the organisation's own count. In London, a mother named Harriet Anscombe, whose daughter had been receiving the books since she was three months old, described the effect with plain honesty: the early deliveries had embedded bedtime stories into their routine before her child was old enough to remember a world without them.