On February 28, 2002, Jim Blair pledged $3 million to the FPL Foundation in testament to three women in his life: his grandmother, Bessie Motley Blair; his aunt, Mary Grace Blair; and his late wife, Diane Divers Blair. Recognizing that Jim's gift was by far the largest ever made by an individual to an Arkansas public library, the FPL Board voted to name the new building Blair Library. In the following interview, conducted last June by FPL's writer-in-residence Bob Ford, Jim speaks from the heart about his love of books, his unfinished novel, and why, for him, libraries remain “repositories of truth.”

Bob: What's your first memory of the library?

Jim: There was a wonderful librarian, I think her name was Hazel Deal, who let me break the rules. I brought a cardboard box to the library and I filled it up. However many books you could or couldn't check out, or what children could or couldn't check out, was totally ignored. And I took my box of books and walked the five or six blocks back down to the corner of School and Meadow, where, when I could get away from my chores, I would devour them all and bring them back and replace them with another box.

Bob: Where was the library at that time?

Jim: Over the old city hall, on the third floor. There were three enormously steep staircases, and of course there was a pretty good hill between me and the library.

Bob: Do you remember any of the titles in that box?

Jim: I remember trying to read the Iliad . I was very much on the side of the Trojans. I loved knights in armor. I read every version of King Arthur and the Green Knight and Lancelot and Guenivere and Galahad. I guess I was eleven when I discovered Sir Walter Scott and I read Ivanhoe . After that, Victor Hugo. And I read The Three Musketeers, Man in the Iron Mask and Monte Cristo . All of this escapist, wondrous stuff. I accidentally read more history than I intended to, and a certain amount of travel. There wasn't any focus, there wasn't any plan. When I was about 16, I read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and that one just set me on fire. I discovered Somerset Maugham at some point. Sometimes I was lucky enough to just read things at the right age.

Bob: Any teachers stand out?

Jim: I was strongly influenced by an amazing character named Francis Irving Gwaltney. We called him FIG. He was trying to get a PhD at the University, and when he would run out of money he would teach literature at Fayetteville High School . On opening day he took our textbook, which was Long's English Literature, and threw it on the floor and jumped up and down on it, said we don't need this piece of trash. I was in love. FIG was the first teacher I ever met who really seemed to have his own opinions. He would say that the best modern novel ever written in Italian was Ignazio Silone's The Seed Beneath the Snow . That the greatest modern novel written in German was Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain . He believed these things with great passion. He got me into Hemingway. I would say that, with my grandmother and that librarian and FIG as my three cornerstones, I was amazingly well read. For a kid.

Bob: It sounds like you were headed for a literary career.

Jim: I took 32 college hours my senior year in high school, and my literary teachers asked me if I would go to the University of Chicago if they could get me a full scholarship. And I really was torn.

Bob: What happened?

Bob: And writing?

Jim: What little bit of creative energy I had, I burned up in trying to do legal document writing. I don't know how people like Grisham can really practice law and sit down and do what they've done. I did start a novel one time. On the Tulsa race riot. I never got too far with it. The first time I heard of [the riot] I was in Ma Shook's saloon up here across from Springdale Country Club. She was telling me about this race riot, all these bodies laying in the streets, and I said, "That can't be true, I would know about it." Well, she had pictures. I did quite a bit of research on it. I thought this was a story that ought to be told. I also thought the only way to get it told was to fictionalize it. But I just never finished it.

Bob: Are libraries still relevant?

Jim: They talk about how the Internet's going to replace the library. The net is a wonderful thing, but it's an ephemeral thing, a transitory thing. It's not a repository of human knowledge like the library should be. There will always be a need, I think, for a place where you can check the historical development or changes of knowledge, belief, opinion. Beyond that, I think that there can never be as much magic on the Internet as there is for real readers. You just can't pick up a thousand-page book off the Internet. And you can't sit there and read it. There's nothing like being able to go to sleep at night surrounded by a pile of books.

Bob: I've heard you talk about the democratic nature of libraries.

Jim: The library at the British Museum of 50, 100 years ago, or the New York Public Library on 42 nd Street , those two to me are kind of the quintessential libraries, where a lot of serious scholarship and crank polemics and all kinds of wonderful things have happened. Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital sitting at a desk in the British Museum.

I think people are entitled to think for themselves, and it's wrong to tell other people where there is wisdom and where there is not. I am infuriated constantly over people trying to tell other people what they can and can't read. It's outrageous that anyone would attempt to prevent anyone else from finding out what reality is. A library is such a liberating thing. I am very anti-censorship. That's a battle that libraries are going to have to fight forever. It's ironic that most of the people who want to inflict censorship are descended intellectually from some group that were themselves proscribed in their literature. I guess the idea is that once you get the upper hand you try to eliminate competitive ideas.

But that's really only part of it. If you don't have a library where children can find adventure or magic, or wonder and beautiful prose and poignant poetry, they're not going to find it on the Internet.

Bob: I wonder if that is what's behind the Harry Potter phenomenon.

Jim: There's a major streak of anti-authority in those books, and I think that's what the kids are getting off on. They see the Muggles getting their comeuppance and they really like that.

Bob: Can we talk about the three women the new library is named for? I think a lot of folks around Fayetteville loved Diane [Blair, Jim's late wife] and remember her well. But they may not be as familiar with the other two women.

Jim: My grandmother, Bessie Motley Blair, lived in a dugout over in the Gypsum Hills in Oklahoma in the 1880's or ‘90's and migrated to Searcy County, Arkansas, where the school literally was a one room school. She was a student, until they told her that there wasn't any point in her coming to school anymore because there wasn't anything anyone could teach her. So she did what people did in those days: she became a teacher. She didn't have any formal education, but she understood and appreciated how valuable literature was to the human soul.

And she and my grandfather had aspirations for their children. Their daughter was Mary Grace Blair, who graduated from high school at 14, and at 18 graduated from the University of Arkansas . At 19 she had a Masters in chemistry. She eventually went on to get a PhD from Ohio State in organic chemistry at a time when women weren't doing that.

It all tracks back to Bessie. A lot of my own idiosyncrasies, too. They all track back to Bessie.