Yesterday, the Texas Book Festival and the National Book Festival jointly honored Mrs. Bush with a Lifetime Achievement Award for Literacy, Libraries, and the Literary Arts, an honor recognizing her extraordinary, enduring leadership in advancing reading, authorship, libraries, and public access to literature.
This joint recognition is rooted in two extraordinary milestones. Thirty years ago, Mrs. Bush founded the Texas Book Festival while serving as First Lady of Texas, creating an annual celebration of literature that has become one of the most beloved and accessible cultural events in the state of Texas, free and open to the public. And, twenty-five years ago, as First Lady of the United States, Mrs. Bush founded the National Book Festival, which has since grown into a premier national celebration of authors and readers in the nation’s capital.
Titled “Encouraging Minds,” the award features bronze bookends designed by Brad Oldham that depict an open book blooming into Texas wildflowers. The sculpture will live on as a permanent display at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, where it will be filled with a curated selection of books from both the Texas Book Festival and the National Book Festival, titles that have shaped generations of readers.
Remarks by Mark Updegrove, President and CEO, LBJ Foundation; at the Texas Book Festival and Library of Congress Presentation of the Lifetime Achievement Award to Mrs. Laura Bush
It’s an honor to be here today to pay tribute to Mrs. Laura Bush for all she has done to promote books in our state and in our nation.
That great American philosopher, Groucho Marx once said, “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”
Ernest Hemingway did Groucho one better. He said, “There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
I would assert today that there is no more loyal friend to books than Laura Bush. The awards bestowed on her today from the National Book Festival and the Texas Book Festival-both of which she created-bear that out.
Back in 2010, I had the pleasure of interviewing Laura on the 15th anniversary of the Texas Book Festival shortly after the launch of her memoir, Spoken from the Heart. She talked then of books as “the guiding passion” of her life. “At every moment of my life,” she said. “I’ve wanted to read.”
Her love for literature has not gone unrequited. She spoke movingly about the role reading played in her life as First Lady:
“At the White House, in the late afternoon,” she said, “those were the hours I would fill with books. Especially after September 11th, when there was that constant anxiety, that constant worry of another terrorist attack, and, obviously, worrying about our troops once they were deployed, that was the time reading could be the most comforting to me.”
At a time when she was comforting the nation after the horrific attacks on 9/11, books were comforting her.
As we discovered after her time in the White House, Laura is not only a reader, she’s also a writer-and a good one. With apologies to Lady Bird Johnson and Barbara Bush, Spoken from the Heart is my favorite First Lady memoir — and one of the “loyal friends” that sits on my bookshelf.
Zadie Smith has called reading “a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we’re someone else.” But reading can also make us believe that we’re somewhere else. While reading Spoken from the Heart, I was transported to Laura’s native West Texas and I was enchanted. Here’s a passage from the book:
“In Midland, the sky sits overhead like a flawless dome, bowing up from the earth at the edge of each horizon. The land does not pitch or rise but remains perfectly flat, without bright lights or tall buildings to obscure our view. So complete was the darkness that all we saw were the stars and the inky blackness. Above us, the constellations hung like strands of Christmas lights waiting to be plucked, and I would lift my little-girl arms to try to touch the glowing orbs. Lying beside me on the blanket, my mother pointed out Orion, the Little Dipper, Cassiopeia, and the planets, the glowing of Venus or the distant fire of Jupiter, as her mother had done for her. And she would say, ‘Laura, look at the sky, because it won’t look like this again for another year.’
“‘Look up,’ she would say, ‘Laura, look up.'”
Laura, we look up to you for all you’ve done to elevate books in our country, to lift us up through the transformative power of the written word. Thank you for all you have done to make our state and our nation richer, more inspired, and more enlightened.
