In the Great Green Room, there was a telephone and a red balloon and a picture of the cow jumping over the moon.

Those words have been spoken aloud at countless bedtimes.

Parents and children generations over can recite them from memory, but few know who it was who committed those famous lines to the page?

Can you name the author of good Night Moon?

I didn't even realize that Margaret was my favorite author when I was a child.

This is Amy Gary, author of in the Great Green Room.

The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret wise Brown.

She did a lot of books that a lot of people don't know she wrote.

She's much more famous for her works than for her name.

In her lifetime, Margaret wise Brown published more than one hundred books.

The prolific author also wrote many many more works that went unpublished for years.

More than seventy of Margaret's unpublished manuscripts sat hidden in a cedar trunk in Vermont.

The trunk was stored in the attic of her sister Roberta's home.

So I thought, oh my god, they've got to be ruined, because the Vermont winners are brutal, and there's just no way these papers would have survived.

Amy's concerns are born of experience.

She was part of a small publishing company.

She knew books and how delicate they can be.

She first got to know Roberta thanks to her efforts to reprint some of Margaret's older works.

They got to talking, and then a few months later Amy found herself hunched over at her desk looking at over five hundred pages of unpublished manuscripts.

It was onion skin paper, which is this really really thin paper, and they were stacked to end.

This trunk was full, completely in to end of things.

Margaret had left behind.

Books, music, poems, personal notes.

The trunk held a veritable treasure of all sorts of things Margaret Wise Brown set down on paper, very very delicate paper.

For more than thirty years, Amy has published selections from the trunk of treasures from Margaret's written life, and along the way, a striking portrait of Margaret has emerged.

She found joy where she could find joy, and she lived hard.

She lived well.

I hope to write something serious one day, as soon as I have something to say, But I am stuck in my childhood, and that raises the devil when one wants to move on.

Margaret Wise Brown was a rare one.

She lived part time on an island in Maine in an abandoned shack with no running water or electricity.

She blew royalty checks on brand new Chryslers and transatlantic vacations.

She died doing a can can kick, and when she passed she left her fortune to a nine year old neighbor.

But none of those anecdotes are the main course for today's episode.

Today's story is about her deceptively complex classic children's book Goodnight Moon, because if the New York Public Library had gotten its way, you would have never even heard of it.

This is Very Special Episodes, and I'm your host, Sarah Burnett Today's episode Goodnight Moon.

Welcome back to Very Special Episodes.

I'm Jason, She's Dana.

He's Zaren.

Do you guys read Goodnight Moon as a kid.

Oh?

I loved Goodnight Moon.

Completely, big fan favorite in the Burnette household.

Dana, do you plan to read good Night Moon to you're young and keep the tradition going?

You know, we actually don't have it.

I have a seven month old baby.

Is the shock update of this episode of Very Special Episodes.

And we have a lot of kids books.

We're in a big green Eggs and ham fades.

I'm also reading Chester's Way a lot, which is very fun for me, but he is too young to kind of even absorb it.

Like there's baby books for him those are so boring.

So I'm just like reading books for older kids to him that I kind of enjoy it.

Right seven months of the same baby.

Book exactly, So I'm just like reading what I want.

I just ordered and this is exciting.

King Big Goods in the Bathtub, which I remember reading when I was a kid.

Stay tuned to see whether Arthur likes that one.

My grandma Nana, she turned ninety four this week.

She got my kids a Hallmark version of good Night Moon where she got to record herself narrating it and then nailed it.

Oh.

I don't know if Hallmark still has access to this technology, but it was an incredible gift.

She has a very nice, soothing voice, so they probably for several years every night I heard Nana reading Goodnight Moon to them, and she added some like DVD commentary about what what else was happening on the page and whatnot.

It was delightful.

So I have a very positive association with the book.

That's such a good gifts like a good literary feud, especially one that involves librarians.

So this hits all the boxes for me.

Oh yeah.

Margaret wise Brown was born in Brooklyn in nineteen ten, the middle child of three in a well to do family.

Her parents sent her off to attend boarding schools in Switzerland and Massachusetts, and when she was home, she was not expected to follow the traditional roles common for girls of that age.

Her father encouraged her to enjoy the outdoors, to hunt and to fish.

She was a talented beagler.

It's a type of small game hunting where the hunter runs along alongside a pack of hunting dogs.

Margaret had no problem keeping up.

She traveled extensively as a child.

She knew what was interesting, and she had kept diaries her whole life since childhood, and she would just go back into her diaries, remind herself of what she was feeling at different times throughout her life, and draw on those emotions put something into writing.

When Margaret was growing up, fairy tales were the preferred stories her children.

Princes, fairies, dragons, they were all the rage.

But when Margaret began to pen her own stories, they focused on the real world of what was around her, what she directly saw, felt, and smelled.

A bug in a rug, a bug in the grass, a bug on the sidewalk, a bug in a glass.

After graduating from Holland's College in Virginia, she moved back to New York.

Margaret began submitting short fiction to magazines, unsuccessfully, but her writing output in those days was prolific and unconventional.

Big as the whole world, deep as a giant.

Margaret seemed to love words above all else.

She told one professor she hated writing stories.

Quote with plots.

Quiet is electricity rushing about the world.

I can read yet another little furry bunny doing something, little furry animal doing something, and I come away amazed at how perfect her poetry is.

Quiet as electricity, rushing about the world, quiet as mud.

These are the sentences.

Margaret treasured her prized audience, and as far as she was concerned that the best authors around were children, specifically five year olds.

As she once wrote in an.

Essay, all these are five year old similes.

Let the grown up writer for children equal or better them if he can.

Margaret also tried to become a teacher, again unsuccessfully.

She wasn't great at leading a classroom, much like her writing.

She was a bit unfocused, much like her young students.

And then Margaret found a kindred soul.

Lucy Mitchell said, I may have created the here and now philosophy, but Margaret gave it wings, and she did.

Lucy Sprague Mitchell was an educator who taught at Berkeley.

A woman dissatisfied with the gap between girls and boys education, so she upended the educational system.

Prior to Margaret and her mentor's work on children's literature, girls and boys had been educated separately.

Girls had one track of education, boys had another.

In separate classrooms.

Girls were taught simpler mathematics, less complex theories, materials far different from what boys learned, which made it impossible for girls to be on equal footing when they were placed in a co ed course in college with boys.

So Lucy Mitchell her mentor had been at the high levels of education within the California system and realized you had to take it all the way down to the kindergarten level and start from there.

So she brought in all of these different methods from around the world to help move education forward, hopefully making it as she called it, democratic for boys and girls to be educated, not only for girls to be educated equally, but for boys to see the girls as equals.

So one of the things that they did was they wanted them to be able to use the same language within literature.

The Bank Street School theorized that in order for education to really be quote equal, boys and girls needed to be reading the same things, learning the same lessons, seeing themselves through the same lenses.

But if you took textbooks for literature and tried to have it be taught in a classroom that were fairy tales and fables, and you still had the trend of girls looking for me mauraged to be their ultimate goal.

The same books Margaret had grown up on were still the ones she began to teach to her students.

Well, that wouldn't do for a revolutionary classroom in the nineteen thirties, so she enrolled at Lucy's Bank Street Cooperative School for teachers, and Margaret did what she did best, She wrote for children.

So she and Margaret began writing textbooks to forward stories that used characters that they created.

More than that, they wanted to give children their own words back to them.

The Bank Street school philosophy was based on the here and now storybook, or what Lucy had dubbed here and Now.

The here and now philosophy was, we're going to give the child their own world back to them their own here and now.

It was a very unique way to approach a child's world.

We're not going to talk down to the child.

We're going to talk to the child.

We're going to talk to them at their level.

Instead of expecting them to be little adults, we're going to talk to them as children, and we're going to give them their world as they see it and let them be who they are.

If we are writing for these delights and interests of five year olds, we must remember them and experience them in our stories.

And another thing, no matter how important we know little kittens and steam engines to be to a five year old, no one can ever write about them without a real love for them and familiarity with them in some form, actual or remembered.

So they would have children write stories for the teachers, and then they would take the stories look at the words the children used around a particular event.

They would take that vocabulary and by age rank the words that the children used and then use that list of vocabulary to be able to write their stories for children.

The educators quite literally let the children pick the words for the adults to compose into sentences.

The words were ones that kids connected with, savored, and enjoyed.

The children would also become the words.

And then they would also physically let the children become different characters, like buzzing bees or pretend to be a dog.

Then they would note what the children did as that dog.

They did the same with illustrations.

They brought in artists and let the kids be the judges of which pictures spoke to them.

And if it didn't ring true to the children, the illustrators were sent back to try again, because sometimes it didn't really look like a car to the children, or it didn't really look like a dog to the children.

This was key because the kids saw the world with their tiny eyes of wonder.

The educators wanted the adult artists to do the same.

She wanted true fine artists to learn how to illustrate for children because they were to see the world differently as well.

How do you take something that is bold and different and put it into something a child would see?

How do you have an illustrator, recreate sound through art, have a jagged piece of art, illustrate what it is she's trying to portray through her words.

The educators also pulled from the emerging field of child psychology to help craft their stories.

They both were very much aware of how psychology played into a child's mind at different ages.

A really good example of this is Runaway Bunny.

Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away.

Around the age of two, a child begins to see themselves as separate being from a parent.

If you run away, said his mother, I will run after you, for you are my little bunny.

And it's scary.

It's a very scary thing for the child.

They have this sort of love hate relationship with being an independent being.

So Margaret knew about this French love song that she had heard when she was in boarding school in Switzerland.

The love song is the musical account of an unwelcome advance.

There's a relentless pursuer and a narrator who wants nothing to do with them.

Think if you pursue me, I'll become a fish to escape you.

If you become a fish, I'll become an eel to hunt you down that kind of thing.

If you run after me, said the little bunny, I will become a fish in a trout stream, and I will swim away from you.

Margaret knew that sort of if you then I changing method would really work in terms of the mother child relationship, but doing it in terms of safety instead of threatening.

If you become a fish in a trout stream, said his mother, I will become a fisherman, and I will fish for you.

Those kinds of psychological assurances worked really well for the runaway bunny, and she knew it would because she understood that psychology that plays well for that particular age.

So assurances giving back to the children what they heard, they saw, they understood at those particular ages was crucial to helping a child begin to understand their own world.

The children were in charge.

Margaret was simply a wordsmith.

She selected from the children's vocabulary, She borrowed from their language of sights and sounds and smells, and then in their rhythms, she transformed the children's words into poetry.

She was like a dj of syllables and phonetic phrases that delight children.

Ever, the child herself, Margaret was very good at it.

She knew how to comfort a child because she had sought some of that comfort on her own as a child.

She knew what she needed as a child and remembered what she needed.

Shucks, said the bunny.

I might just as well stay where I am and be your little bunny.

And so he did have a carrot, said the mother bunny.

Margaret's world of bunnies and bugs and of curious eyes peering through bushes resonated with children, and it was profitable too.

As the popularity of the here and now philosophy grew in terms of the publications being bought and other publishers adopting this idea that yes, we can publish directly to the marketplace and not just take fairy tales and fables and redo them.

And it was the wild West of children's publishing, and it was a lot of arguments within the publishing world itself.

Margaret wasn't just satisfied with revolutionizing children's books.

She wanted everything, every part of the publishing process to become better.

We're going to now have golden books sold at pennies instead of dollars, and everybody can have books in their homes.

Little Golden Books.

The publisher for many of Margaret's works specialized in those durable, hardcover, brightly colorful, and importantly affordable children's books.

Usually the publisher printed in both color and black and white to save on printing costs.

The low cost books were successful, but they also lowered the esteem for the writers and illustrators who worked with the publisher.

Other book companies came to the conclusion that.

If they worked for Golden Books, they were going to be doing cheap books.

And Margaret went on a stump tour of publishing panels and just said, there is no such thing as cheap books.

If you have good writing and good illustrations, that's quality.

With Golden Books, we are giving them just some of the best stuff that's out there.

Yes, it might be priced more cheaply, but the quality is there.

And you know what, those same books are still on the racks today.

Margaret also did the same sort of goodwill tour for illustrators.

She worked very closely with her illustrators, which we do not do in publishing anymore.

You have an illustrator over here and an author over here, and near the two shell meet.

But she invited her illustrators to come and work and collaborate with her, because they really were defining a whole new way to make books for children.

Very interactive.

As a businesswoman, she made the books she wanted to read and to look at.

At the time she started working, illustrators were paid nothing, and she realized that if she were to keep these illustrators that she loved working for her, they had to make as much as she made.

And so she went to her publishers and said pay them more, and they said, nope, we're not going to do it.

She said, well, then split my royalties with them.

She demanded that her publishers, if they're not going to use something, she wanted her rights back, and she also fought to keep rights that they weren't going to use.

All of the ructures that she created we still use in publishing today.

Every single royalty structure she created is still in place.

Once Margaret's books were in wide circulation and readers loved them, that's when the publishers who'd previously turned up their noses at Lucy's Here and now approached to Kitty Litt were suddenly lining up to knock on her door.

According to Amy, at one point, demand for Margaret's books was so strong she was writing for six different publishers under different pen names.

She was also working across genres.

Margaret wrote children's books, but she also penned adult poems, she wrote music, and she was even beginning to branch out to TV and to radio.

I have mad respect for this woman.

Her telegrams to her publishers were things like I better not see you on the streets of Paris, or I'm going to shoot you with my bow and arrow.

So was she did it with such grace and he ilarity that they couldn't really be mad at her.

And she was right, darn it, she was right.

Despite becoming an adult author and successful children's lit author, Margaret still hadn't really grown up.

Ever, the big kid success certainly didn't spoil her.

She remained a true eccentric character.

Margaret was always with the dog in tow if she could be.

When she was in New York City.

He was known to peddle on people at bus stops and pretty much get up to no good anytime he was with her.

Allegedly, one time, Margaret tried to leave her dog in her convertible.

The dog wasn't into that idea.

So she tied his leash to the steering wheel and she went about her business.

In no time he was you know, I think he pulled the steering wheel off the car with his leash and was running down the street or something.

After that, she came to the only reasonable conclusion.

She decided it was best if she kept her dog with her wherever she went.

One day, Margaret, she showed up to a business meeting with her agent.

And she was carrying these two ice cream cones with her, and she thought, oh, how lovely Margaret's brought us ice cream.

And Margaret's down and begins to give the dog ice cream cones, not the staff, but the dog, so that she could have her meetings with her dog in tow.

Margaret's life was entirely her own.

Basically, she lived a sort of life she'd want to write about.

There wasn't much daylight between the quirky stories she wrote and the days she lived and enjoyed to their fullest.

In her thirties, Margaret moved into a small apartment in Manhattan.

But it was not what you may be picturing.

It wasn't a tall building.

In fact, it was another shack.

It was a small white clapboard shack low to the ground in Greenwich Village.

It was a little house in the middle of a big city, and nobody knew it was there.

She'd go on to write some of her most beloved works in and about her secret big city shack.

She wrote about her home in a book, The Hidden House.

It had been there for years and years, for over one hundred years, forgotten, and there it stood, in a hidden garden in the middle of the big block of skyscrapers.

At her studio Cobble Court, named after the cobblestone streets that surrounded her hidden house.

Margaret continued to compose poetry and literature according to the philosophy of here and.

Now the Great Green Room.

Perhaps she never fully realized how consequential those everyday settings and mundane objects would become.

There was a telephone, but.

She saw the world with a child's eyes, the kind that can enliven anything, even the most mundane, like wallpaper.

One time, Margaret grew enamored with the bold colors of a neighbor's apartment.

She wanted it to feel like you were walking into a Spanish painting.

And she's seen this apartment with the bold red, bold green, bold yellow, and she wanted to recreate that in the book, or she.

Could find a world in the nooks and crannies of her studio.

And a young mouse, and so the mouse that was in the hall, which I think she really did have a mouse in that little tiny apartment of hers.

That it is based on physically is it is cobblecorp.

Margaret also recalled the nighttime spent in her childhood bedroom calling out to the moon with her sister.

ROBERTA good night room, good night moon, good night cow, jumping over the moon, good night light in the red balloon.

The actual idea from Goodnight Moon came from her childhood with her sister.

She and her sister would say good night to all the things in the room as they were going to bed.

Good Night bears, goodnight chairs.

Can you picture the room from the book.

There's the three bright walls, nearly askew, nestled against the far wall.

There's a crackling fireplace, tucked safe and cozy inside the sheets of the big red bed.

There's a little bunny and peering in through the windows, surrounded by a starry night.

Is a bright white full moon when it came out in nineteen forty seven.

Good Night Moon won praise from The New York Times, The Paper of Record highlighted the book's rhythms and it's now iconic illustrations, which certainly expressed the philosophy of here and now.

And she was also publishing a lot of discussions about whether or not she should blend fantasy into reality.

Margaret wanted every child to see themselves within a story by placing animals as the protagonist.

So as you notice in Goodnight Moon there's a bunny in that bed.

It's not a child, it's a bunny.

So every child can see themselves as that bunny.

Doesn't matter, gender, doesn't matter, race.

And at some point they actually thought about making the old lady human and instead made her bunny because that would have broken that wall of fantasy of the bunny.

And then do you clothe the animals?

Do you not?

I mean, like, where do you blend that reality and fantasy.

While Margaret was successfully reimagining the style and the philosophy of books for kids, not everyone loved her big new ideas for how to change children's literature.

Remember how we said the New York Public Library would get involved in all this, stay tuned for the lions about to roar.

Let's just be frank about it.

Goodnight Moon is a weird book.

The color scheme is weird.

There's a tiger's skin on the ground.

Bunnies shoot tigers.

Sure everyone is bunny's for some reason.

That's Betsy Bird.

Now, Betsy wasn't there to bad mouth good Night Moon back in nineteen forty seven.

But she is a librarian and formerly with the New York Public Library, which is how she knows so much about one certain librarian who did sharpen her knives for good Night Moon.

There's certainly no plot, and then it kind of goes, heywhy where it's like good night nobody?

Like what are we saying good night to the void?

You know?

Any way you slice it, this was a strange book.

Anne Carroll Moore did not approve of it for Newer Public Library, which meant it didn't get added to near Public Library.

And Carol Moore in many many of the stories you may read or hear about Margaret wise Brown, this librarian comes off as the villain.

And Carol Moore, she'd been head of the New York Public Library's Children's section by nineteen forty seven, she was working in a consulting role.

So Anne Carroll Moore was, as I say, pretty much what you kind of picture when you picture a library.

If you look at photographs of her, she's very stately, you know, good straight back on her.

Take your expectations for a stern, no nonsense librarian, and then crank it up to ten and then past ten up to eleven.

She was that extra.

Even though people liked to portray Anne and Margaret as diametric opposites, both women were equally eccentric.

She had a little wooden Dutch doll named Nicholas, whom she would speak to on a regular basis.

It was probably seen as a little weird then, it's certainly seen as a little weird now.

So people would make tiny things for Nicholas, and she would keep them in a large case.

There was a tiny faberget egg from a former Russian countess I believe, who had escaped the country prior to the revolution, and so just imagine like the world's tiniest faberge egg.

Despite her tiny wooden Dutch doll, Nicholas, or the tiniest faberget egg, and her sordid treasure trove of oddities and gifts, and Carol Moore held enormous influence in the book world, and not just over libraries, but over books all over the country.

Her name was synonymous with children's literature.

And Carroll Moore was completely known by everyone everywhere.

She was the person who started children's services at near public library, and she had had huge sway over not just children's book collections in New York, but all over the country thanks to her newsletters and her choices and her best of books of the yearless so when I came in, her name was synonymous with what it meant to be a children's librarian and the name.

To know and children's lit Because before and Carol Moore, children's literature didn't exist, not really, not in the way we might think of it.

So to really understand how important Ann Carroll Moore was, you kind of have to understand what the state of children's book publishing was at that time.

If you wanted a children's book, the bookstores there were mostly favored adult books, and so you'd probably have to go to the library.

The librarians had more sway over the children's book industry than anyone else.

Ann Carl Moore sort of led the charge at New York Public Library, and all children's authors, illustrators, and even editors would come to her.

They wanted her stamp of approval.

What she approved, librarians around the country would purchase.

Ann's power was so great she held sway over bookstores and libraries all across the country.

She was also involved in the creation of the Newberry and the Caldecott Awards, which are today two of the most prestigious awards in children's literature.

And as a result, you know, it very much depended on what she saw was good and what was bad.

And what she thought was bad were things that she called truck.

Not like what you might drive.

Truck was Anne's portmanteau for books she saw as part toy and part book, and worthless as both.

Truck was no good, So books that seemed like toys like Pat the Bunny Truck series, like Nancy Drew Truck, Let's see the comics.

Oh do I even have to say it?

Truck truck Truck.

She really wanted kids books to be seen as their own legitimate literature form, and she was hugely influential in getting people to believe that.

Anne's mission doesn't sound particularly villainous.

She wanted to provide the children of America with good, clean books, stories written for kids, and being a traditionalist, naturally, she preferred fairy tales.

This is why if you go into many an older children's room, you'll find a huge fairy tale folk tale collections section.

That's because that's what librarians wanted.

Fairy tales and folk tales, the exact same stories.

Margaret grew up reading the exact same stories that made her want to go full on Bank Street School and revolutionized children's lit.

But her rival, Anne Carol Moore disagreed on philosophical grounds.

She believed the only good books were the fantasies because that's what Anne Carrol Moore liked.

She felt that children lived in sort of a magical time and there was this certain kind of book that suited them better.

She liked fantasy quite a lot.

She was not as big a fan of realism, and she certainly wasn't a fan of when realism and fantasy intertwined.

This is kind of one of the reasons she clashed with new thinkings about childhood that came out of places like the Bank Street School of Education, and of course who came out of the Bank Street School of Education, Margaret wise Brown.

Anne opposed everything Margaret stood for, all the thoughts she'd put into how to best blend the real world with the fantastic, the time she spent learning how to play with anomanopea the way children do, to make her words sing like poetry and sound like childhood, no matter to her the stern head librarian and Carol Moore, she wasn't listening.

So the Bank Street College of Education, they had a very specific way of teaching their educators.

You see how kids see things, you think how kids think, and you don't disparage it in any way.

So it's funny that Anne Carroll Moore was trying to get a form of legitimacy for literature for the actual kids themselves.

She was not interested in the psychology of the child.

She was interested in giving them the best books, which she would determine because she was an adult, and quite frankly, if you let kids choose, they'd choose something she didn't approve of.

So this was almost a philosophical difference that they had with one another.

But for Ann Carroll Moore, children's books had a very specific role that they were supposed to fit, and anything that didn't fit into that role was seen as other and therefore suspicious and maybe not as good as kids deserved.

Nineteen forty seven, Good Night Moon was published.

That meant the two rivals were guaranteed a face off because Margaret had to make the pilgrimage to the New York Public Library to make her case before Anne Carroll Moore.

And like everyone else, Margaret wise Brown had to make that trip and try to sell her very unique style to Anne Carroll Moore.

And Ann Carroll Moore, you cannot say she never added a Margaret wise Brown book to her shelf.

She did, but she didn't add them all.

So there were certain titles she didn't add, and one of them was, without a doubt, Good Night Moon.

What was the result of her pilgrimage to the New York Public Library A clear, resounding, and now legendary no.

Ann Carroll Moore ruled that the New York Public Library would not carry Good Night Moon.

Looking back, we can't know what was going through Anne's mind when she made that decision, but thanks to those long forgotten papers from a cedar chest, Betsy Bird does have an idea or two about why this the book was rejected and not others from Margaret Wise.

Brown Bunnies had worked with Runaway Bunny, though these bunnies were wearing clothes and had telephones and owned cats.

Let's just think about that.

So, like I say, there's a level of weird internal logic going on there.

Andermore did not deal well with weird internal logic.

There were other classics and Carol Moore barred from the library shelves.

Charlotte's Webb and Stuart Little come to mind.

They were on Anne's no Library list to give you a better idea of what classics she would call truck But in the case of good Night Moon.

And Carroll Moore came out very much against all of the here and now books.

Here's Amy Gary with Margaret's side of the story.

There are many letters back and forth between Margaret and Bill Scott, the publisher, about what they're going to do about the fact that New York Public Library, a very prominent stalwart in terms of library and content, would not carry the books or review them.

And it was frustrating for them because it was just a hard line in the sand against what they were doing.

Yes, this major librarian's book review and support would boost her new book's popularity.

But Margaret was also a well established author.

She and the publishers had other ways to get reviews, mainly through newspapers.

However, it's still felt like a very personal slight to her.

There are letters from where she is written to Ursula.

That's Ursula Nordstrom, who's a well known children's book.

Editor, about how it hurt to be treated so poorly by Anne Carol Moore.

And I hurt for her because she wanted that acceptance as a writer of not children's books, but children's literature.

And I will say, you know, she may have lost the battle, but she sure as heck won the war.

Looking at Margaret and and here were two brilliant women entirely dedicated to their shared goal to legitimize and advance the promise of children's literature.

Just like Margaret wise Brown and Carol Moore wanted to give children their own literature because she also cared about kids.

And keep in mind, this was at a time when having a childhood like we know it was a luxury and not common.

This is not long after a time when children simply were not even allowed in libraries, the idea of creating a space for them was still relatively new, because children were grimy, disgusting many adults and did not deserve their own space.

I mean, half the time if the kid was working class a had coal dust on their hands.

She was someone who truly believed that children not only belonged in the library, but they deserved to have really good books for themselves in the library.

Perhaps even more radically, and believed all children should have access to stories.

While Margaret wanted to make education between boys and girls more egalitarian and knew that opening a children's library in New York City meant opening a new library in one of the most diverse cities in the world, and she intended to reflect that diversity in the shelves of the children's library.

She wasn't just saying white, rich kids need to be in the library.

She literally wanted every single child in the library.

Under her watch and the watch of her successors, that system was set up with the understanding that all children belonged in the library.

And then, of course, yes, she was buying books from around the world, which quite frankly is difficult to do today, and then they had to be good books.

So she would find the best books in other languages for kids and put them in the library for them specifically.

So this is what she believed a library was and could do.

To be clear, many of these books, while they may have been in a different language, were intended to help immigrant children assimilate and to quote, become more American.

Still, what Anne believed in was quality literature for children, just like Margaret did.

They wanted kids to read things that mattered.

Where they didn't quite see eye to eye was the question of what mattered.

It is so easy to be on the side of Margaret wise Brown.

She's more fun than Anne Carroll Moore, and Carroll Moore is literally the librarian that shoushes you.

Margaret wise Brown died because she did the can can for fun in her hospital bed.

I mean literally, they could not be more diametrically opposed in so many ways.

So I have a lot of sympathy as a result for what I consider to be the underdog in this story, and that's Anne Carroll Moore and Carrol Moore did not destroy Margaret wise Brown's career, and in fact, possibly we kept some of her lesser good books out of the library I don't think she deeply loathed Margaret wise Brown.

I just don't think she had anything fur.

As a librarian today, Betsy still feels protective over Anne.

The fact of the matter is that if you're a critic, it's very easy for people not to like you.

But if you're a critic, you are trying to separate the wheat from the chaff.

As a librarian, my job is to find the best of the best of the best and to hand them over and to make kids fall in love with reading.

And you cannot get kids to fall in love with reading if you're giving them schlock or I'm sorry, truck.

These days, our job is very different.

We still are looking for the best, but we have so many books to look through, which is wonderful.

But we also have so many voices we can like listen to and hear and read through.

Betsy likens the root of children's librarianship to quote windows and mirrors.

If you just read books all about yourself, you're looking into a mirror.

However, when you read about the world.

It's like a window you can see the experience of other people.

Margaret's books were certainly a window into another world, another way of being.

After working with Margaret's papers and letters and diaries all these years, something that has really touched me is to understand how to live true to yourself.

And it was a journey for her to fight against the system to be true to her own sexuality at that time.

I can only look at her at the time and just say I think she did the best she could with what she had at the time, and she brought so many people along the path with her, and she fought for her own self in terms of business in a way that a lot of people didn't have the guts to do.

Margaret died young.

She was just forty two.

It was recovering from an emergency surgery.

A nurse asked Margaret how she was feeling.

Margaret high kicked her leg up to show the nurse she was feeling great.

That sudden movement dislodged a blood clot in her leg.

She died shortly after.

Twenty years after her death, in nineteen seventy two, the New York Public Library added Good Night Moon to its shelves.

By that time, the world of children's literature had caught up to Margaret.

The shelves were now stocked full with follow along books that depicted the world from a five year old's eyes, Goodnight Moon was now the classic.

Although sales had dipped in the years just before Margaret's death, After she passed, the sales numbers slowly began climbing.

Amy Gary has a theory as to why.

There are many reasons I think Goodnight Moon has touched so many people.

One is it did hit at the absolute right time.

As we've noted, Margaret public plish Goodnight Moon in nineteen forty seven, she was just in time for the biggest baby boom America had ever known.

They named the Whole Generation after that explosion of infants.

Babies were being born, parents were reading it.

But more than that, she wanted there to be an interactive element to it.

So you have the interactivity of the parent and the child finding the mouse together.

So it's not just a story that's being read to the child.

It's a moment together for the parent and child to share.

Good Night, little house and.

Good night mouse.

This unassuming little book, red and yellow and Green started making its way through households, appearing in bedrooms and classrooms.

Typically it was read aloud.

Good night comb and good night brush.

Sales kept climbing, fifteen hundred copies in nineteen fifty three, twenty thousand copies in nineteen seventy, more than four million copies by nineteen ninety.

So you're passing this on generation to generation.

It just builds and builds and builds over generations.

So they want that experience with their own child as they grow up, and it just continues to magnify and magnifon.

Turns out, Margaret was on to something with her quote strange way of writing.

Her words left an indelible mark on the whole industry of children's literature, precisely because of how nonsensical her words sounded.

Good Night nobody, good night mush.

Even if a certain librarian saw her new style in writing philosophy as mere.

Truck and good night to the old lady whispering hush.

Margaret brought a child's world to the page, and in doing so, she did indeed revolutionize children's literature.

Good Night stars, good night air, good night noises everywhere.

So it might be a challenge to try to adapt good Night Moon the book for the big screen.

I think HBO something in the nineties to go back and check that out.

But Saren, if you were in charge of casting the podcast about the book, yes, it was in the story.

Well you know, I like you.

I love a story of two people fighting against each other to do what they truly believe is a good thing.

Like that's the recipe for great drama.

So like, I was so into the casting for this one.

For Margaret wise Brown, I thought Emma Stone because she can do that poetic, quirky in her sleep, right, So I think you have her play Margaret wise Brown.

And then for her not stone cold rival, but her rival, and Carol Moore, you go with another Ann and Halfaway because people seem to love to see her as a villain.

So I was like, I can see her playing a librarian.

I mean, can't you see a full grown Ann Hathaway playing with her a little wooden Dutch doll named Nicholas.

I mean, I'm in that moment, right.

And then and for Lucy Mitchell, the California educator with the here and now philosophy, I was thinking, mix it up Selena Gomez.

She'd be fun.

She seems literary.

Boom, there you go, you got a hit movie.

I love this.

I love a literary thriller.

It's kind of my favorite genre of movie.

And also, did you look up actual pictures of Margaret wise Brown because she was a babe?

Yeah?

Yeah, that's yeah.

I was trying like not to say that exactly what happened.

I'll say it, she objectively is a baby.

I had to consider it in my casting.

There's one other character that didn't play a big role in the episode, but his name is Albert Clark, and he's the one who has willed the copyright.

You know, he inherits the good Night Moon Fortune, even though he's just a neighbor of Margaret wise Brown.

I think the kid from adolescence could play young Albert Clark.

Good call, let's get him in there.

Yes, a little bit of a tragic story for Albert Clark.

The New Republic ran a story in twenty twenty one and talked about how when he turned twenty one he got the rights.

Now, the book wasn't a huge success at Margaret wise Brown's death, so I don't think anyone was expecting this would just be throwing off millions of dollars for his whole life.

Some run ins with the law, oh wow.

But he lived until eight seventy four, died in twenty eighteen, and now his four children are the copyright holders.

What the right term is they are getting the money When my grandma buys a book from Hallmark and records herself.

That's amazing.

What a lucky turn.

Seriously, do we know any reason why he was the benefactor for her wealth?

Did he like play some role in her life?

Was he like just the cool kids she loved seeing play?

According from Wikipedia, neighbors, Yeah, neighbors.

The fact checker had some good notes about what we could and couldn't say, just some speculation, and so the son of a neighbor friend, I guess, is where we're gonna go.

Okay, I think it's sweet, totally sweet, strange turn of events, but totally sweet.

Also, by the way, did you guys I don't know, but if this one struck you, but the Ann's portmanteau of truck, I'm going to use it.

I love the idea of something that is both a toy and a book.

And as I got to dismissive derogatory term, I'm totally putting that one in the act.

It's a truck.

Yeah, exactly.

Those baby books that Dana is sick of truck.

Yeah, but at least Good Night Moon has this like weird echoey liminal quality too it that I find kind of entrancing.

Totally.

No, I'm so kind of surprised at the book publishing.

It took him so long to get to the here and now philosophy.

Were they allergic to making money?

It's so obviously like this is like the future of children's literature, and they're just like no dragons.

Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people.

Today's episode was written by Carmen Borca Correo and edited by Emily Rudder from the Wonder Media Network.

Wonder is a great partner of ours at Very Special Episodes.

They worked on the Andy the Sneaker Wearing Goose episode, which was many people's favorite that we've done this year, and they'll have more to come.

Very Special Episodes is hosted by Zaren Burnett, Danish Schwartz, and Jason English.

Our producer is Josh Fisher.

Editing and sound design by Chrischilds, Additional editing by Mary Doo, mixing and mastering by Chris Childs, fact checking by Maya Shukri.

Thanks to our troop of extraordinary voice actors Katie Maddie, Chrischilds, Josh Fisher, Jonathan Washington, Charlotte English, and Juliette English.

My middle daughter Kate is ay at summer camp.

She didn't get a chance to read for the role.

Original music by Elise McCoy, Show logo by Lucy Kintonia.

Our executive producer is Jason English.

We are taking a break from publishing new episodes as we work on our fall and winter slate.

We've got a lot of good stuff in the works.

Maybe we'll pop on and do a preview episode later this summer.

In the meantime, if you'd like to email the show, you can reach us at Very Special Episodes at gmail dot com.

Dana is the most famous Danish swartz on TikTok and Instagram.

Zaren is Zarin three on Twitter.

I just joined Instagram.

I'm Jason English nine.

Let's keep in touch over the summer.

Very Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.