Jon and Mac consider: the plight of the picture book author, wildlife trafficking, tangenting, disappearing socks, death, life, and mush
Okay so the Klassen/Barnett Goodnight Moon piece is making the rounds, and it's a lovely piece of close looking, the tangenting and the vocative comma and the trap door of "goodnight nobody," all of it correct. But there's a moment in the framing where Barnett does the thing that picture-book people always do, which is reach for the warm explanation when the cold one is sitting right there. He asks why sales exploded in the seventies and answers: the kids who heard it in 1947 grew up and bought it for their own kids, and those kids grew up and bought it for theirs, the great sentimental relay race of American childhood. Nobody knows exactly, he says, but I have a theory.
The timing actually checks out, which is the trap. A kid read Goodnight Moon at two or three in 1947 is born around 1944, becomes a parent around 1970, and there's your seventies spike, right on schedule. It's worse than that for the theory: the relay race runs on time and still can't be the engine. The reason is supply.
Because how many kids actually heard Goodnight Moon in 1947? Six thousand copies sold that first year, and then sales fell, and by 1953 the book was moving fifteen hundred copies a year and the publisher was eyeing the cull list. That's the whole circulating population during the years the supposed rediscoverers were children: a few thousand copies a year, in a country, blacklisted by the dominant buyer. The cohort that could grow up and nostalgically seek out the book they remembered is, by the book's own sales figures, tiny. You cannot have a mass rediscovery of a book that was nearly out of print while the rediscoverers were being born. The echo is real, it just can't carry forty-eight million units, because the thing it's echoing barely existed yet.
So once you go looking at who was buying children's books in this country and through what channel, it stops being a mystery about the staying power of great art and becomes a fairly boring story about distribution.
The fact Barnett actually mentions and then walks past: the New York Public Library did not own a copy of Goodnight Moon until 1972. Twenty-five years. He treats it as a sad footnote, a posthumous snub. It's the thing that set the sales.
Okay so, what a library was, commercially, in 1947. It was the buyer. Not a buyer, THE buyer. Before the postwar paperback build-out and the mall bookstore, the trade in children's hardcovers ran through institutional purchasers, and institutional purchasers ran through a very small number of tastemaking librarians, and the most powerful single node in that entire network was the children's department of the New York Public Library, which for decades had been built and run and personally embodied by a woman named Anne Carroll Moore.
Moore is a genuinely large figure and the easy version of her is wrong. She invented, more or less, the idea that children should be allowed into libraries at all (they were frequently barred until fourteen), that they should be allowed to check books out, that there should be a person whose whole job was the children's room. She chaired the thing at the American Library Association that became the body that hands out the Caldecott and the Newbery. When she gave lectures to New York publishers in 1918 telling them to make books that entertained children instead of browbeating them, the publishers reorganized around her.
So when I say she was the buyer I'm undercounting. She was the buyer, the critic, the credentialing body, and the taste itself, all in one retired-but-not-really-retired woman who kept running the department meetings after her own successor took the title.
And she thought Goodnight Moon was garbage. "An unbearably sentimental piece of work," per the internal review. She came out of the fairy-and-fancy tradition, Beatrix Potter, the velveteen-rabbit vision of childhood-as-enchantment, and Brown came out of Bank Street and the Here-and-Now school, the clanging-garbage-truck, name-the-real-objects-in-the-real-room program, and Moore experienced the second as an attack on the first, which it sort of was. So she didn't stock it. And because she didn't stock it, the libraries that took their cues from NYPL didn't stock it, and because they didn't stock it, the dominant purchasing channel for the dominant format simply closed to the book.
Watch what that does to the numbers. Six thousand copies the first year, 1947. By 1953 it's down to fifteen hundred a year and the publisher is thinking about killing it. This is a book that would go on to sell, conservatively, forty-eight million copies, and in year six it is on the cull list because one woman in one building decided it was tacky.
And the close-reading crowd would love this if they followed it one step further: the squeamishness Moore represented had already gotten INTO the book before publication, surgically. Goodnight Moon's editor at Harper was Ursula Nordstrom, who had personally watched Moore try to strangle Stuart Little two years earlier, and who knew exactly what the librarians flinched at. So Nordstrom went through Hurd's art pre-emptively defusing it.
The cow jumping over the moon was drawn, originally, with an udder, the way a cow has an udder, and Nordstrom had Hurd reduce it to what Brown's biographer called an anatomical blur, because a cow's underside was the kind of bodily fact that made the Important Ladies wince. There was a mouse in an early study sitting right on the bunny's bed, and Nordstrom had it moved off, because a mouse on the bed read as vermin, as dirt, as the wrong kind of real.
The book you're close-reading for its uncanny dream logic was also, at the level of the marks on the page, edited by anticipated librarian disapproval. The udder is censored. What Klassen clocks as Hurd "messing with us" is partly Hurd being managed around a buyer who wasn't going to buy it anyway.
It didn't work, obviously. Defanging the udder didn't move Moore an inch; she killed it anyway. Brown didn't live to see any of the sequel. She died in 1952, age forty-two, in a hospital in France, recovering from surgery for an ovarian cyst, and she kicked her leg up cancan-style to show a nurse how well she felt and dislodged a clot that went to her brain and killed her more or less on the spot.
So the author is dead, the book is on the cull list, the most important buyer in the country has blacklisted it, and it is 1953. By the warm theory this is the trough before the great generational tide. By the cold theory the book is just dead, and would have stayed dead, except that the channel it died in stopped being the only channel.
And what happened between 1953 and 1972 has nothing to do with anybody's tender memories. The retail book trade got built. Walden, B. Dalton, the mall chains, paperback racks in places that weren't libraries, and the whole locus of who-buys-children's-books slid off the institutional purchaser and onto the parent. The library stopped being the gatekeeper because it stopped being the store.
And once a parent standing in a Waldenbooks is the buyer, Anne Carroll Moore's opinion is worth exactly nothing, because the parent has never heard of Anne Carroll Moore. The parent has a screaming toddler and a book that is engineered, at the level of its susurrating sounds and its dimming light, to put a toddler to sleep, and the parent buys it again, and tells the other parent at the thing, and the recommendation network that sells the book is no longer the library-school sorority, it's word of mouth at the level of the exhausted.
The boom is the demand side of this, and the mechanism is more boring than the memory version. The boom babies were BORN, in enormous numbers, to parents who had to put them to sleep, at exactly the moment the retail channel matured enough to sell those parents a sleep aid without a librarian's permission. The cohort that drives the numbers is on the supply side of the next twenty years, not the readership of the first five. It's the tens of millions of new babies needing to be put down at night, and the new stores selling their parents the thing that does it. The book sells because the babies exist and the stores exist and the gate is gone. By 1970 it's moving almost twenty thousand a year. By 1990 it's past four million lifetime. By 2000 it's doing eight hundred thousand a year all by itself.
So then 1972, the NYPL finally buys a copy. And everybody tells this as the redemption beat, the library coming to its senses, Margaret Wise Brown winning at last. But look at the order of operations. The book was already selling. The book had already routed around them.
Moore had died in 1961, the demographic and retail wave was already cresting, and the library acquiring the book in 1972 is not the cause of anything. It's a lagging indicator. It's the institution that lost control of the market finally noticing the market had moved without it and quietly restocking the shelf to match what everyone already owned. The gatekeeper opening the gate after the wall's been knocked down.
There's a coda that makes the whole materialist point almost too on the nose, which is the board book. The single best-selling format of Goodnight Moon today, three-quarters of the eight-hundred-thousand-a-year, is the board book, the indestructible chewable cardboard slab handed to a one-year-old. The board book has no author photo, runs almost no text-as-text, and exists because the object's job is to survive being gummed and thrown.
The thing that made Goodnight Moon immortal in the end was, on top of the poetry that Barnett correctly identifies and the modernists would've recognized, a manufacturing format that let you sell the same hundred and thirty words to a customer who would physically destroy the previous copy. Brown's estate, incidentally, sees the royalties on all of it and she sees none of it, because she's been dead since Eisenhower, and the royalties went to the young son of a neighbor, who later claimed Brown was secretly his mother, and who blew the Goodnight Moon money on drugs and, by some accounts, crime. The most soothing book in America funded a minor true-crime footnote. Fine.
So that's (a). The seventies aren't a mystery and they aren't a tribute. They're the lag between a book getting blacklisted by the institutional buyer and the institutional buyer ceasing to matter, with the boom generation as the demand and the mall as the new gate. The art is real. The art was always real. The art sat on a cull list for six years because the art's quality and the art's sales ran through completely different machinery, and only one of those machineries had Anne Carroll Moore standing in it.
Now (b), the stuff with material fodder that a close-reading piece leaves on the table, because Klassen and Barnett are looking at the page and the page isn't where some of the best material is.
The color-and-black-and-white alternation. They flag it, correctly, as a rhythm device, and then both note in passing that it "might have to do with midcentury printing techniques." It's not a might. The full-color spreads and the cheaper one-color vignettes are an economic structure showing through as an aesthetic one. Color printing in 1947 children's publishing was a per-signature cost decision, you got a budgeted number of full-color plates and you spent them, and the standard move was to alternate color spreads with cheaper monochrome ones to hit a price point. What Hurd did, and this is the actual artistry, is take a cost constraint, the thing forced on him by the plate budget, and convert it into the book's pulse, the wide color room versus the close grey object. The thing that reads as a deliberate dreamlike oscillation between the room and its remembered pieces is, underneath, the printer's invoice. Constraint became signature. That's a more interesting story than "the colors are unsettling, absinthe-y," and it's invisible if you only look at the page and never at the press.
The palette itself, the orange-and-green that everyone finds slightly nauseating and that Barnett calls a used-car-salesman's-tie. There's a material reason a 1947 book looks like that and it's the inks and the registration tolerances of the period, the limited cheap-and-stable pigment set you'd use for a mass children's title, and the way those greens and oranges sit is partly a fingerprint of what was affordable and lightfast in the plant. We read it as a bold modern color choice. Some of it is a bold modern color choice and some of it is what the four-color process of the era could cheaply and consistently hold. The "off" feeling is partly aesthetic intent and partly the technical envelope of mid-century mass color, and you can't fully separate them, which is the point.
The cigarette. This one's perfect and they don't touch it. For at least twenty years the back of the book carried a photo of Clement Hurd holding a cigarette, because in the mid-century a man on a dust jacket holding a cigarette was simply what a photographed adult man looked like. In 2005 HarperCollins digitally erased the cigarette out of his hand, leaving him waving at nothing, fingers extended around an absence, because the cultural meaning of a cigarette had inverted from sophistication to a harmful-message-to-very-young-children.
His son, also a children's illustrator, said the doctored photo looked absurd, his father waving at empty air, and was right. They printed seventy thousand copies of the man waving at nothing rather than just find a different photo of him not smoking. The book didn't change a word. The world's relationship to a cigarette changed, and the object got quietly retouched to keep pace, which is a cleaner little fable about how the past gets continuously edited to remain sellable than anything in the text proper.
The pseudonyms, which sound like whimsy and are actually labor economics. Brown wrote something like a hundred children's books in fourteen years, fifteen in addition to Goodnight Moon in a single 1946-to-1948 stretch, and she published under a stack of pen names, Golden MacDonald, Timothy Hay, Juniper Sage. The romantic read is the playful protean artist. The material read is that she was running an industrial output rate across multiple publishers who didn't want the same name on too many of their lists in the same season, and the pen names are a volume-management device, the literary equivalent of a studio releasing films under different labels so as not to flood its own brand. She wasn't being whimsical. She was being prolific in a market that penalized visible prolificacy, and the names are how you hide the assembly line.
And the deepest one, which the piece gestures at and then sentimentalizes: the whole Here-and-Now program that produced Goodnight Moon, the name-the-real-objects-in-the-real-room method, was itself a material artifact of a specific institution at a specific moment. Bank Street wasn't a vibe. It was Lucy Sprague Mitchell's experimental lab school, funded and staffed to do something new, which was treat childhood development as an empirical research subject, psychologists and pediatricians actually observing what small children responded to and building books backward from the data. Goodnight Moon is basically the productized output of an R&D shop. The rhythmic naming, the repetition, the sounds chosen because Brown's speech-development research said those were the sounds that caught a young child's attention first, this is a designed object that came out of a lab, and the reason it works on your kid with that slightly creepy reliability is that it was reverse-engineered from kids. Barnett knows this, he says it, and then he files it under "she was a genius poet," which she also was. But the genius poet was working inside a research institution that existed because somebody decided childhood was a thing you could study and design for, and Goodnight Moon is what the study shipped. The Fairy Tale Wars that Moore was fighting weren't about taste. They were about whether children's books would be made by enchantment or by empiricism, by a librarian's sensibility or by a lab's findings, and the empiricists won so completely that we now find it hard to even see Goodnight Moon as the product of a method, because the method became the water.
Moore lost because she was defending a craft against an industry, and the industry had a research arm and a retail channel and forty-eight million units in it, and she had a sensibility and a shelf she controlled until she didn't. The udder's still blurred, though. Whatever else changed, nobody ever un-blurred the udder.
