Library Card Sign-up Month kicked off Monday, with Stan Lee serving as its honorary chair.

An annual campaign of the American Library Association, it's intended to remind parents, educators and children that a library card is an important tool to academic success. Lee's image appears in print and online in public service announcements containing the quote, "The smartest card in my wallet? It's a library card."

"When you have a library card it's like having a key to all the information in the world," the 91-year-old creator says in a video (below). "When you have a library card, you can read anything about anything, and I have found that whatever you read, it doesn't matter, it increases your fund of knowledge. So a library card is the 'Open Sesame' to all the knowledge in the world."

In the video, Lee recalls as a child being a frequent visitor to public libraries first in Manhattan and then in the Bronx because he couldn't afford to buy all the books he wanted to read. "Without libraries, I just wouldn't have read as much as I did, so it would've been a great loss, to me," he says.