Robin Woods started reading the encyclopedia while he was in prison. When he found a typo, he wrote to the book’s editor, not sure if he would ever hear back. Photograph by Albane Doyet / EyeEm / Getty

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.

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.