Goodnight Moon

Goodnight Moon is a very familiar book to most people. It is one of the first books that newborns receive, for sure. And “read” it they do, over and over again!

Margaret Wise Brown spent several years studying and working among teachers, researchers, and child psychologists at Bank Street’s Cooperative School for Student Teachers,  a childhood development think tank and nursery school in New York City. There, she focused on language and semantics among the school’s young students, who favored sound and rhythm rather than actual communication in the early stages of education and socialization. It was this experience that informed Brown’s classic picture book Goodnight Moon — a story that is as much a soothing, rhythmic lullaby as it is a narrative yarn.

The book came out in 1947, when most other books for children were retellings of fairy-tales and fables. The fact that Goodnight Moon was a new story with a contemporary setting was almost revolutionary; it represented the “here-and-now” philosophy popularized by Bank Street and its founder, Lucy Sprague Mitchell.

The story follows the bedtime ritual of a bunny who says goodnight to various objects — the moon, a red balloon, a little toy house, a little white mouse — before finally drifting off to sleep. Clement Hurd did the illustrations, which are full of Easter eggs for folks who pay attention to detail. The little mouse, for example, appears in a different spot on each page, and as the story progresses, the clock goes from 7:10 to 8:10. Even better, another hit storybook by Brown, The Runaway Bunny, is shown on a bookshelf in the room. 

Reception to Goodnight Moon was mostly positive, but early sales were slow and the New York Public Library famously refused to stock the tale, deeming it too contemporary and sentimental. In fact, the book didn’t make it to the shelves of the venerable library system until 1973, nearly three decades after it was published. By then, sales had picked up considerably, with annual numbers increasing from 4,000 copies sold in 1955 to 20,000 copies sold in 1970. Its popularity continued to grow from there: As of 2017, more than 48 million copies 48 million copies had been sold worldwide. The book also appeared on the National Education Association’s list of Teachers’ Top 100 Books for Children, and was voted one of the School Library Journal’s Top 100 Picture Books in a 2012 poll. Even the New York Public Library eventually came around and included Brown’s classic story among its 100 Great Children’s Books From the Last 100 Years. 

Thank you, Margaret Wise Brown! What a sweet, charming little book to start the littles off!