Goodnight Moon

After months and months of Goodnight Moon, we've switched to How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight?

But because Benjamin's grandma is visiting and isn't quite into the level of repetition that little'ns are famous for, we switched back last night to Margaret Wise Brown's bedtime masterpiece. Interesting timing.

From Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of Margaret Wise Brown,born in Brooklyn, New York (1910). She was one of the first writers to write books specifically for children who were just beginning to learn language.

Brown wanted to become a writer as a young woman, and she once took a creative writing class from Gertrude Stein. But she had a hard time coming up with story ideas, so she went into education. She got a job at an organization called the Bureau of Educational Experiments, researching the way that children learn to use language. She eventually began to write books for children based on her research, and in 1938 she became the editor of a publishing house called William R. Scott & Company, which specialized in new children's literature.

Margaret Wise Brown helped make children's books profitable, because she understood that children experience books as sensual objects. She invested in high-quality color illustrations, and she printed her books on strong paper with durable bindings, so that children could grab, squeeze, and bite their books the way they did with all their toys. And then, in 1947, she published her own book, Goodnight Moon.

The influential New York Public Library gave it a terrible review, and it didn't sell as well as some of Brown's other books in its first year. But parents began to recommend the book to each other, and it slowly became a word-of-mouth best-seller. It sold about 1,500 copies in 1953, 4,000 in 1955, 8,000 in 1960, 20,000 in 1970; and by 1990, the total number of copies sold was more than 4 million.

- papa