In Addition to History

Two-year-old Blake Augburn holds a book
at Smart from the Start, an early-learning
center in Southeast D.C.
FROM THE EDITOR
LOGAN WERLINGER
Cranking
Up the
Volumes
Back in 1992, when friends
Kyle Zimmer, JD ’87, Elizabeth
Arky, JD ’86, and Peter Gold
started the nonprofit First Book,
they handed out 12,000 books,
which is pretty tremendous. That
was 24 years ago. As Julyssa
Lopez reports in this issue, First
Book now distributes 15 million
free and low-cost books each
year, a number that over time has
added up to 140 million books.
“Millions” has lost a bit of
grandiosity over time; it’s muddy
turf, being both a somewhat
household term and still almost
unimaginably vast. So let’s
put this into perspective: Onehundred-and-forty
million copies
of The Cat in the Hat laid end to
end lengthwise—the hardback
copy in my home, anyway—
would span the 2-mile trek
between the Lincoln Memorial
and the U.S. Capitol more than
10,000 times. Standing atop one
another, they would climb to the
International Space Station and
back again 40 times. Or, packed
and shipped, they would be
nearly enough to put two books
into the hands of every person
18 years or younger in the U.S.
The volume is staggering, but
so is the implication: The unmet
need is that deep. And perhaps
the most compelling thing First
Book does has little to do with
volume; it has to do with content.
It’s a massive effort that
diffuses into many more hundreds
of millions of microscopic impacts
that could remake the surfaces
on which a generation will build
its creativity, its confidence and
its awareness of self and others.
Danny Freedman, BA ’01
managing Editor
@TheGWMagazine
gwmagazine.com / 3