TCNJ

42 The College of New Jersey Magazine CLASS N O T E S S P R I N G 2 0 2 0 Since 2017, Abrams has collected more than 300,000 books. W henever Larry Abrams MAT '01 visited the mall as a kid in upstate New York in the 1980s, he'd "make a beeline for the bookstore" to see what was new on the shelves. The son and grandson of educators, he'd been surrounded by books from infancy and reveled in the images and ideas the written word detonated in his mind. Later in life, while serving on a Navy battleship in the Persian Gulf and then managing a print shop, he always had "two or three books" on his active reading list (recently, it's been lots of memoirs and history). So 16 years into his career teaching high-school English, Abrams was stunned when one of his students told him she wasn't reading to her year-old child. Her family had no books in the house, she said. Abrams' heart sank. A child without access to books "is going to be at a disadvantage when they get to kindergarten," he says, referring to results from numerous studies. "They're missing exposure to hundreds of thousands of words." He put out a call for book donations on social media. The response: "an avalanche" totaling about a thousand books, which he began seeding throughout Lindenwold, the economically disadvantaged town in South Jersey where he teaches. Soon, teachers from other districts started asking him, "Hey, how can I get some books? Can you share?" He could, and did, quickly filling his garage with donated books for infants through young adults and becoming "a bridge between affluent, book-rich communities" and places like Philadelphia, where, he said, teachers are told, "you have to have robust classroom libraries," but get zero funding for them. Abrams' son, Rob, now a rising senior at TCNJ, came up with the name BookSmiles ( booksmiles.org), and the operation became a nonprofit in 2017. Since then, Abrams has collected more than 300,000 books — and aims for a million. With a donation from a publisher, he was able to rent a 1,000-square-foot warehouse space last August. BookSmiles asks teachers for a one-time donation of $10 "so they have a little skin in the game," but then they can take away all the books they can carry, Abrams says. He insists that books be new or nearly new so their users have the experience that can only come from cracking open stiff covers. "To see the joy that teachers get when they pick up the books is incredible," he says. He's also eager to get books into the hands of TCNJ education graduates, no matter where they end up teaching. With many new teachers in debt and earning small salaries, "I have to make sure that these wonderful young people don't have to dip into their pockets," he says. "I don't care if they're working in affluent districts. If they want to come by to get books, hey, that's fine." —John T. Ward

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