The Encyclopedia Reader

By: Daniel A. Gross for The New Yorker.

A few months ago, Robin Woods drove seven hours from his home, in Maryland, to visit a man named Mark Stevens, in Amherst, Massachusetts. The two had corresponded for years, and they’d spoken on the phone dozens of times. But they had never met in person. Woods, who is bald and broad-shouldered, parked his car and walked along a tree-lined street to Stevens’s house. He seemed nervous and excited as he knocked on the door. A wiry man with white hair and glasses opened it.

Within a few minutes, Woods, who is fifty-four, and Stevens, who is sixty-six, were sitting in the living room, talking about books. The conversation seemed both apt and improbable: when Woods first wrote to Stevens, in 2004, he was serving a sixteen-year prison sentence, in Jessup, Maryland, for breaking and entering. It was a book that had brought them together. “I never met you until today, but I love you very much,” Woods told Stevens. “You’re a good man.”

At Jessup, Woods had begun reading Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia, a four-pound tome that starts with an entry on the German city of Aachen and ends with zymogen, a protein precursor to enzymes. He hoped to read all of its two and a half million words, and he spent hours flipping through the pages, following cross-references. “Once I would find a subject, it would lead me to the next,” Woods told me. “You could put a whole story together.” One day, he was puzzled to read an entry stating that the Turkic ruler Toghrïl Beg had entered Baghdad in 1955. He quickly realized that it should have said 1055. “I read it several times to make sure,” he said. Then he turned to the masthead, which listed the editor, Mark A. Stevens.

“Dear Mr. Stevens,” Woods wrote in a letter, “I am writing to you at this time to advise you of a misprint in your fine!! Collegiate Encyclopedia.” He described the error and offered his thanks for Merriam-Webster’s reference books. “I would be lost without them,” he wrote, unsure if he’d ever get a response.

Gross-The-Encyclopedia-Reader-02
Woods’s first letter to Stevens, written in 2004.
What Woods didn’t mention in his first letter to Stevens was that the encyclopedia represented the culmination of his self-education. Woods grew up in a housing project in Cumberland, Maryland, a two-hour drive from Washington, D.C. Cumberland was once an industrial center, but it has become one of the poorest metropolitan areas in America. Woods was first sent to prison at twenty-three, for shooting up the apartment of a woman he knew, with his grandfather’s rifle, after a drug-related dispute. He was young, embittered, and almost completely illiterate. “I had never read a book in my life,” he told me.

Woods remembers enjoying first grade, but he says he was bullied on account of his light skin. (Woods was raised by his mother, who was African-American. His father was of mixed race.) In second grade, he developed an antagonistic relationship with his teacher, who made him sit in the coat closet whenever he annoyed her. Eventually, the school transferred him to a special-education program. As he progressed through the grades, Woods says, instead of learning to read and write, he was given chores like collecting attendance slips and stacking milk in the cafeteria refrigerator. These tasks earned him mostly A’s and B’s. “Now, of course, I didn’t learn nothing,” he said. In high school, whenever a teacher asked him to read aloud, Woods would put his head on his desk in shame. “They say it takes a community to raise a child,” he told me. “It takes one to destroy a child, too.” Woods dropped out of school.

During his first stint in prison, Woods began his own course of study. He was sent to a notoriously harsh prison in Hagerstown, Maryland. He resented authority figures and often directed furious outbursts at the guards, who responded by putting him on lockup. For twenty-three hours at a time, and sometimes longer, Woods was alone in a cell that had no television or radio. To distract himself, he would yell out to his neighbors—“the fools on the tiers,” as Woods calls them. Then, one day, a man with a cart of books wound his way through the lockup tiers, shouting “Library call!” Woods wasn’t interested at first, but his boredom won out: he decided to borrow “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and “The Sicilian,” a novel by Mario Puzo, the author of “The Godfather.” Built into the cell door was a small slot, the “soup hole,” which guards passed food through. Books came through the same slot.

The autobiography proved “too complicated,” and “The Sicilian” was only slightly easier. “Many, many words I had to skip over because I couldn’t read them,” Woods said. Each page took him about five minutes. On the sixth page, Puzo introduces Stefan Andolini, a Sicilian with “lips like bloody hacked meat” and “a face that made you dream of murder.” Woods was intrigued. “Wow, this thing is pretty good,” he remembers thinking.

By the time he came to the final pages, about a week had passed. “I remember that I wept,” Woods said—not because of what he had read but because he had succeeded in reading. “Even though it was a Herculean task for me to get through that first book, I had beat the system. Because I had learned that they had lied.” He bought his first dictionary at the prison commissary and began etching words into his memory by copying them down and reading them aloud. He read into the early hours of the morning. “My mind was free,” Woods said. “I could escape.”

For a brief time, Woods also regained his physical freedom. In 1987, he finished his sentence and moved back to Cumberland, where he lived in a shack and worked occasionally for a man who cleaned offices. Books had expanded his world, but they hadn’t made it any easier for him to stay out of trouble. One night, Woods says, he got drunk and stole a car. He drove it to one of the offices he’d helped clean. “I knocked the window out, and then I had access to the building,” he told me. “I stole some stuff—computers, typewriters, some telephones.”

He abandoned the car but still had thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment on his hands. The next day he went to a local club and, over a game of pool, tried to sell some of it. Then a group of state troopers walked in the side door. Not even two years had passed since his release, and Woods was once again incarcerated in Hagerstown—an institution he had come to detest. In 1991, he took part in a riot so severe that it made headlines from Baltimore to Los Angeles. Several correctional officers were injured, and several prisoners were shot in the effort to regain control. Woods brandished a homemade steel knife during the melee, though he says he didn’t use it on anyone. He says he was subsequently “red-tagged” in Maryland as a dangerous prisoner. His sentence was extended by seven years.

There are a few ways that books enter prisons. They’re sold at prison commissaries and lent by prison libraries; nonprofits distribute donated books to prisoners. There are restrictions, however: hardcover books are typically off-limits; the Bureau of Prisons also prohibits texts that are “detrimental to the security, good order, or discipline of the institution,” or that “might facilitate criminal activity.” Many prisons add their own idiosyncratic rules.

Even so, Woods managed to assemble a small library in his prison cell. “A lot of prisoners put emphasis on how many Nike shoes they have,” he told me. “I would wear a pair of prison tennis shoes if necessary, but I had eight hundred or nine hundred dollars’ worth of books.” Woods ordered his encyclopedia through the mail, after reading about it in a catalogue. When it arrived, he said, it was carefully inspected for contraband.

In late November, 2004, Mark Stevens received a letter at work from the Maryland House of Corrections. He soon responded, on Merriam-Webster, Inc., letterhead. “I believe you’re the first to have spotted the error in the Toghrïl Beg entry; by 1955 Toghrïl was no longer exactly in his prime,” Stevens wrote. “Please stay on the lookout for more.” Woods was thrilled, and soon he wrote again, highlighting errors in the entries for Edward the Confessor and Uthman ibn Affan—“not as a critic, but as a friend,” he explained in his letter. “For I believe that M.W.I. is the crème de la crème, I would like to help it to stay that away [sic]!”

Gross-The-Encyclopedia-Reader-03
Stevens’s response to Woods’s first letter.
Over the next two years, Stevens sent eighteen letters to Woods; Woods sent several dozen to Stevens. They discussed the life of Cleopatra and the self-education of Malcolm X, but Woods barely discussed his criminal record, and Stevens never asked. “They were perfectly executed letters, and very courteous,” Stevens said. “It still seems astonishing to me.” One concluded, “I have the honor to be, Sir, your most obedient servant.”

In 2005, Woods learned that he would be transferred, without a clear explanation, to a supermax prison in Baltimore. Officials told him he wouldn’t be allowed to bring his books. In protest, Woods went on a hunger strike. “I’ve gone crazy and will not eat until they allow me to keep my books,” he wrote to Stevens. Several weeks later, he wrote another letter, this one short and despondent: “I look like walking death. But I’m hard-headed and shall not give up. . . . Where this will end I can’t say.” Woods told me that, locked in a single room, he lost about seventy pounds. “I had a terrible body odor, because what happens is, your body starts to poison itself, because it starts to eat itself.”

One day, as Woods remembers it, he saw a shadow on the wall of his cell. It was the Maryland Commissioner of Corrections, who asked about his health. “He had a very curious look on his face,” Woods told me. “He said, ‘Who is this Mark Stevens?’ ” Woods remembers thinking, How does he know Mr. Stevens? As it turns out, Stevens had written to two prison wardens, and eventually word had gotten to the commissioner, who called him back. They spoke about Woods and the encyclopedia. Not long after that, the commissioner offered Woods a deal. If he would end his hunger strike and follow the rules for a year, the commissioner would cut short the extended sentence and send Woods home.

“I feel like a kid getting out of high school,” Woods wrote to Stevens near the end of 2006. “The whole world is waiting for me!” In January, 2007, eighteen years after the start of his incarceration, Robin Woods was discharged from the Maryland Correctional Institution in Jessup. He had around fifty dollars to his name.

Woods moved once more back to Cumberland, where he was given housing by a local pastor. Every few months, he called Stevens. At first, he worked odd jobs, but eventually he found work as a private driver and bodyguard. The phone calls continued for a decade before they finally agreed to meet. When Woods visited Amherst this past June, he and Stevens were soon acting like old friends: they took hikes, went to a play, and visited the home of Emily Dickinson, where a plaque quotes her lines: “There is no Frigate like a Book / To take us Lands away.” On Sunday, after a goodbye hug, Woods began the long drive home.

When he pulled up to his apartment, it was almost midnight, and something seemed strange. His window was hanging open. When he went inside, he saw that someone had broken into the house and gone through his things. About five hundred dollars and some belongings were missing. For a moment, he hoped the robber hadn’t left: he was seething and wanted to retaliate. Woods has never spent more than a few years between arrests; in addition to the two longer prison stays, he’s had some shorter ones. Still, he sometimes talks about “the old me,” emphasizing the sharp division he sees between his past and his present. Eventually, he called the police. “Now I have to depend on the law to get satisfaction,” he told me. “What poetic justice is that? That now I know what it feels like to be invaded.”

When Stevens found out about the break-in, he mailed Woods a check to help pay for the losses. It wasn’t the first time he’d helped Woods financially. “I have no dependents,” he told me. “There’s nobody I’m supporting in the world.” The book that brought them together is no longer at the center of their relationship; recently, after twenty-four years as an editor, Stevens was laid off by Merriam-Webster. These days, few readers rely on print encyclopedias.

Woods rarely reads anymore—partly, he told me, because it takes considerable effort just to pay the bills and keep clear of the law. In some ways, he said, his life in Cumberland seems smaller than the one he imagined from a prison cell. “While my body is here in prison, my mind has seen the world,” Woods wrote to Stevens, in 2005. “There are a lot of places that I hope to see that I have read about in my many books.” Stevens responded by quoting another book, T. H. White’s “The Once and Future King.”

“The best thing for being sad,” Merlyn says in the novel, “is to learn something.” He continues:

That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love. . . . There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.