Brookline Booksmith is expanding its partnership with a nonprofit that gives free books to people in prison thanks to an anonymous donor.
For Banned Book Week, which runs through October 11, the donor will match the cost of all books purchased from the Prison Book Program’s wishlist on Booksmith’s website, which is compiled through requests by incarcerated individuals.
Booksmith has partnered with the program for the past four or five years, said Peter Win, the store’s co-owner and co-manager.
On the wishlist are books on language learning, legal aid, self-help and trade skills, as well as an assortment of novels.
Kelly Brotzman, executive director of the Prison Book Program, said the books on the list can provide essential information to incarcerated people.
“People are looking to learn,” she said. “They’re looking to improve themselves. They’re looking to gain skills. They’re looking to do better in life. They’re looking to prepare for release.”
Dictionaries are the top request. “We send thousands and thousands a year,” Brotzman said.
The Prison Book Program, which is based in Quincy and has been operating since 1972, is an approved book vendor for over 1,000 jails and prisons in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Guam. Last year, Brotzman said the organization sent around 70,000 books to incarcerated people.
As part of Booksmith’s partnership with the Prison Book Program, the bookstore donates ARCs, or Advance Reader Copies, which are pre-publication books used for promotional purposes that can’t be sold.
“We’re lucky that we get a lot of ARCs from publishers to preview,” Win said. While the store had been donating ARCs to county jails independently, “it has been helpful to give those to the prison book program as well.”
The Prison Book Program is run entirely by volunteers who comb through prison regulations on book content and formatting, write personal notes, and package and mail books.
Among those volunteers are “book fairies,” people who peruse vintage and second-hand stores, and garage or yard sales to help source books for the program.
Despite their large volunteer base, fund-raising is “extremely important,” Brotzman said. The group spent $125,000 on mailing packages last year.
“The cash match comes in really handy in helping cover those postage costs,” she said.
During Banned Book Week, Win hopes to bring attention to book bannings and challenges, and wants people to understand that people in prisons are “very interested in having reading material.”
“Reading is important for everybody,” Win said.
For people outraged about book bans in libraries and schools, Brotzman hopes they turn their attention to the inequities in the prison system.
“Jails are not statutorily obligated to provide any kind of programming whatsoever,” she said. And “even when libraries exist in the prisons, they’re very, very inferior.”
While nearly 2,500 unique titles faced censorship attempts in 2024, according to data from the American Library Association, Brotzman hopes to highlight the “very limited universe of content” incarcerated people have, she said.
“The prison system can literally ban any book they want to… for any reason they want to,” Brotzman said. “It’s really important for people to know that the limitations on the freedom to read are much, much, much more severe for incarcerated people than for anyone.”
Win hopes to continue the standing relationship between the Brookline Booksmith and the Prison Book Program in the years to come.
“I think our work with them has been successful,” Win said. “It’s beneficial for them and beneficial for us.”
This story is part of a partnership between Brookline.News and the Boston University Department of Journalism.
This article was originally published on October 7, 2025.