Your article“For grieving families, a tough final turn of page’’ (Page A1, Feb. 17) brought to mind the situation my three siblings and I had after our father’s death in 2014. Our father, Robert B. McConnell, was a practicing physician in Youngstown, Ohio, for his entire medical career. He loved reading and, over his lifetime, accumulated an impressive collection of books. During the later years of his life he had been reducing the size of the collection by urging grandchildren to take books at the end of each visit and by making other donations.

Despite those efforts, he still had a collection of approximately 3,000 volumes at the time of his death. The collection consisted largely of history, politics, philosophy, and poetry. We were lucky because, before he died, he expressed his hope that his books be donated to prisons. He reasoned that prison life must be a miserable existence and that his books might make it less so. This particular disposition would not have occurred to us otherwise.

It’s not that easy to donate books to a prison. For example, some prisons restrict topics, while other will not accept hardcover books. In the end, two-thirds of our father’s collection were distributed to a jail and a prison in Ohio, and the remaining third was donated to a local bookstore that he frequented and enjoyed. I am sure he would have approved.

Paul Michael McConnell

Scottsdale, Ariz.