Scholar Stories
Before He Could Talk, He Had a Library
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Cradle-2-Graduation StoriesCradle
It gave Dylan a love of books before he could even talk.
Leyssa Garcia
Dylan’s mother
The first one was The Little Engine That Could. It came in the mail, addressed to a baby who could not yet read it, and another one followed every month for five years.
Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library posts a book to a registered child every month from birth until their fifth birthday. There is no charge, no income test, and nothing for a family to do after signing up except open the mailbox. BASIC has run the Borrego Springs affiliate for ten years. Dylan Garcia was one of the children on the list.
- Imagination Library, completed
- Family Literacy
- TK Academy
- Learning Academy
- Scholarship
- Graduate
Dylan is at the first station. Everything to the right of it is still ahead of him.
Five years, one book at a time
What a monthly book does is less obvious than it sounds. It is not really about the individual titles. It is that a book arrives with a child’s own name on the label, again and again, until reading is simply one of the things that happens in that house. By the time Dylan turned five he had a shelf of his own, built one envelope at a time.
- First book
- The Little Engine That Could
- Graduation book
- Look Out Kindergarten, Here I Come!
- Sent with it
- Five more, to keep
- Now
- Reading at seven
Graduating from the program means turning five. Dylan’s graduation book was Look Out Kindergarten, Here I Come!, sent with five more to keep, which is how the Imagination Library says goodbye: by making the home library slightly larger on the way out.
It gave Dylan a love of books before he could even talk.Leyssa Garcia
Ten years of mailboxes
Dylan is one child in one decade of the program in Borrego Springs. The tenth anniversary was marked in April 2026 with a reception, a sheet cake, and a Certificate of Recognition from the California State Senate, which is a great deal of ceremony for what is, mechanically, a list of names and a monthly mailing.
The mechanics are the point. A child in a town of a few thousand people, hours from the nearest bookshop, gets sixty books before kindergarten because somebody kept a list and somebody else paid the postage.
Read about the anniversary: Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library Turns Ten in Borrego Springs.
Every station on this path is paid for by someone in Borrego Springs
The Imagination Library is the first one, and the cheapest to fund. Sponsoring a child covers a book a month from birth until they start school.
Photographs of Dylan published with his family’s signed media release, dated 22 October 2025.