99% Invisible - 415- Goodnight Nobody

Episode Date: September 30, 2020

The unlikely battle between the creator of the New York Public Library children's reading room and the beloved children’s classic Goodnight Moon. Goodnight Nobody Pre-order The 99% Invisible City

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. January of 2020 marked the New York Public Library's 125th anniversary. And to celebrate, they published a list of the 10 most checked out books in the history of the library. And there's one thing about the list that you really can't help but notice right away. That's our producer Joe Rosenberg. It's made up almost entirely of children's books. So the snowy day, the cat in the hat, where the wild things are, Charlotte's web, Dan Coise is a writer at Slate.

To kill a mockingbird, arguably a children's book, also on the list. Well, I mean, I like I read it as a kid, I'm not sure. Anyway. Fine, but come on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, the very hungry caterpillar. The only books quote unquote for adults on this list are 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and how do we friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie love that that book is still on there. All told, seven of the ten books were for kids. Taking together, they were checked out

over two and a half million times. But at the very bottom of the list, Dancoise knows this little flip-out. And it just said, you know, fun fact, good night, Moon. Of course, one of the most beloved children's books of all time was not on the list. The footnote was almost like an apology, because if there's one title that you'd expect to be on the list, it's Good Night Moon. The famous picture book where the little toddler rabbit says Good Night to all the objects in its massive bedroom.

Good night socks, Good Night clocks, Good Night, you know, moon. I was really surprised not only because I know of its popularity, but because I have always sort of viewed it as a kind of platonically perfect children's picture book for the exact moment in the day when you most need a picture book. That moment when you need your child to fall asleep so you can finally take a shower or watch TV or do anything except parent. Still, the book had only been checked out about half as many times as the lowest ranking book on the list. But it wasn't because of lack of interest. No, it was because of one person.

According to the New York Public Library, an influential children's librarian at the library had disliked the story so much when it was published in 1947 that the library didn't even carry the book until 1972. And this librarian's name, according to the press release, was Anne Carroll Moore. Anne Carroll Moore was the head children's librarian at the New York Public Library for pretty much the whole first half of the 20th century. And from nearly three decades, she single-handedly kept Good Night Moon out of the entire library system. That a children's librarian could just say no New York Public Library will stock this book and the idea of children everywhere in the world growing to love Good Night Moon, except for in New York City, where they grew up sad and Good Night Moonless just seemed bananas to me.

Now, at this point, if you're imagining your stereotypical rule-mongering, moralizing librarian giving you the stink eye, Dancoise says, you don't need to imagine it. There are pictures. At the time that there were finally photographs on her taken, she wasn't older lady, who looked like the quintessential bun in the hair, shushing librarian, who's a really easy villain.

But as Dan would find out, Moore was and remains a very complicated historical figure. Because long before she became a villainous banner of books, Anne Carlemore was a hero of children's literature, who left the world with one undeniably good thing. She pretty much single-handedly invented the children's library. Jullaport is a professor of history at Harvard and a staff writer for the New Yorker who wrote about Moore for the magazine. And she says that perhaps no single person has ever done more to get books into the hands of children.

And she did so by creating a place for kids to read. So when you go into your neighborhood public library and there is a thing called the Children's Room and they have potted plants there and they have toys and they have a cozy rug and a rocking chair and they have story hours and they have fun art on the walls like all that stuff was invented by Anne Carole Moore. Today with all the emphasis we placed on instilling kids with love of reading. It's hard to imagine your local public library without a children's reading room. But LaPore says that before Moore came along, children weren't even allowed to enter the one place they would be sure to find a book.

Kids really couldn't go to libraries. Libraries were for grownups. The late 19th century saw some of the first public libraries being built in America. This was an age in which there was a surge in support for government-funded progressive institutions intended for the betterment of all. Or in the case of libraries, the betterment of everyone except children. You had to be, I think, 14 or 16 in most places and in most places you had to be a boy.

And the Brooklyn Public Schools had a policy that children below the third grade do not read well enough to profit from the use of library books. The thinking went that if you were too young to read, obviously there would be no need for you to go to the library. What good would that do you? And if you were old enough to read, obviously there would be no need for you to go to the library. What good would that do to you? And if you were old enough to read, but you were still a child going into a library which was full of trashy romance novels and westerns would just corrupt your mind. And so, you

certainly there's no reason for you to go into a library either. Jilla Pore says that for the children of the wealthy and middle classes, who often had their own small book collections at home, being banned from libraries wasn't really a problem. But it left the children of the poor with virtually no access to literature. It's completely bound up with class discrimination, right? Because it's not really till the 1920s that you have a very strict regulation against child labor. So the children of the poor are working, like they're not reading,

they're not even learning to read. But then at the turn of this entry, Anne Carroll Moore, the crusty old librarian who hated Good Night Moon, came along and flipped the purpose of the library on its head. So I was very surprised recently to read in an article someone described her as the quintessential librarian with the bun in her hair and shushing the children when in actual fact that was exactly what she did not do. Jan Pinbarrow is an editor in children's book author and she says that in the 1890s more it was the most vocal and energetic among a small group of young progressive librarians who would be good experimenting with a radical idea.

What if they finally let kids into a library, stocked an area with children's books, and then made that area just for kids? And what she was trying to do, and this is what's really important, she was trying to provide a childhood to working-class kids. She was trying to give them all the luxury and leisure of having a space with books that are made for them to be able to read so that they would have what we would think of now as, you know, a way to address an achievement gap. And she was trying

to level that field. And in 1906, more got the chance to run this experiment on an unrivaled scale. The New York Public Library was building its iconic main branch at the corner of 42nd Street in Fifth Avenue, and it would feature a dedicated children's reading room that would be designed, stocked, and run by more. And there are just these incredible photographs of that children's room when it opened in 1911.

The photo's depict one of the earliest public spaces designed exclusively for kids. More started by borrowing the idea of kid-sized tables and chairs from kindergarten. But she took the concept even further. She had benches, windows seats, built at the bottoms of the windows, giant windows, but they're like pint-sized. Like if you were five years old, you could sit in those window seats and your feet would touch the floor.

More especially wanted to provide poor kids from the tenements, access to the beauty of the natural world. So she installed pink floor tiles to catch the light coming through the windows and then filled the room with shell collections, butterflies, and dozens of bowls of freshly cut flowers. And these children, a lot of them were stark for nature.

And they would line up for the chance to look at and smell the flowers when she brought them in. More took down the silent signs. The library was now a space for puppet shows and musical performances and story hours, featuring stories in multiple languages, so that the children of immigrants who deny it read or speak English would still feel welcome.

But most importantly, more filled the shelves of the new reading room, with hundreds and eventually thousands of children's books, not locked in a cabinet or in a rich kid's nursery, but out in the open for any child to pick up, leave through, and read. And if a child liked the expensive book they were holding, they could take it home. The only requirement was that they signed their name in a big black ledger alongside a pledge. When I write my name in this book, I promise to take good care of the books I use in the library and at home and to obey the rules of the library. And it was a kind of sanctified moment.

The pledge turned the process of checking out a book into a child's first act of citizenship. The room was an overnight success. Rich and poor kids alike flocked to the library. And more began training librarians to establish new reading rooms throughout New York, including Nella Larson, the prominent African American writer who created the first children's room in Harlem.

By 1913, just two years after the children's room opened, Mora could boast that one third of the volumes borrowed from the city's branch libraries were children's books. And children's rooms were springing up even more quickly in the rest of the country. By the end of the 1920s, by one estimate, there were perhaps as many as 1,500 children's rooms were sprained up even more quickly in the rest of the country. By the end of the 1920s, by one estimate, there were perhaps as many as 1,500 children's rooms in the US alone. And her reach was really worldwide, and there are places and countries where people would say, well, if you walk into that library, you'll realize that that was touched by Anne Carole Moore. The spread of Moore's reading remodel was also instrumental in establishing children's literature

as literature. Moore convinced the library going public that books like the Velveteen Rabbit, Winnie the Pooh, and the works of Beatrix Potter were in fact art. In the 1920s, saw an explosion in dedicated children's departments at major publishers, and prizes like the Newbury Medal, which more helped create.

So, for multiple generations of New York children, Anne Carole Moore was the reason that the libraries became places that fostered their love of storytelling and love of books. But all this came with a crucial caveat, which is that Anne Carole Moore's vision was never limited to simply creating a place for kids to read.

From the beginning, it was also about what counted as children's literature. So even as she was letting more children than ever into the library, Moore was keeping all kinds of books out. And as the head of the children's department in the New York Public Library, she was in charge of choosing the books that the children's departments of all those libraries acquired. And the NYPL's purchases often set the standard for libraries nationwide. Back then, children's titles were only published once a year in fall. So every year, around the same time, more would make a list of her favorite upcoming books.

And that list was used by other librarians across the country. So if you ran a library in Dubuque, Iowa, and you were trying to figure out, well, what am I going to spend my budget on? You just go right down the list and go, I'm going to buy one of this, two of this, three of this, one of this, oh, none of this, whatever. You would use that list to guide your purchasing? More also had a regular review column. The parents and librarians alike used to decide which books were worth buying and which

weren't. So, she's the most eminent children's book reviewer in the country, but then because she was also the chief purchaser for books, she quickly accumulates really far too much power. At the height of her career in the 1920s and 30s, she was like the Anna Win-Tor of Kids Lit. Editors and authors were routinely seen walking up the steps of the public library's main branch between the two marble lions to drop off their books and await Moore's verdict.

If they were lucky, she'd send back notes for suggested changes, which they would doodfully incorporate into the final draft. Others weren't so fortunate. The story about Anne Carole Morrell, though no one, including her biographers, knows whether this was apocryphal or not, was that she actually had a custom made rubber stamp

that read, not recommended for purchase by expert. And that if she didn't like your book, she would stamp that on your book. And you, that's it, your book's dead. No one's gonna order your book, better luck next time it, your book's dead. No one's going to order your book. Better luck next time. And there were a lot of manuscripts not recommended for purchase by expert, because Anne Caromore had very specific tastes in children's literature.

She may have been a great advocate of children's books as art, but in her zeal to protect kids from the horrors of poverty and urban life, more almost invariably favored magical once upon a time stories that felt pastoral and tweey. The whole point was for them to take the less fortunate into their warm, bougie embrace. So her favorite children's books, the ones that she approved, certainly weren't meant to represent anything that a child might actually see or experience in his or her everyday life. They were meant to be little mini escapes into this magical world of talking animals and rabbits and waste coats and whatnot. To be honest, this is kind of where most of my experts for this story

get off the end-carol more train. Like, she was a sharp-eyed critic. it's just it's not my eye so I'm trying to be charitable here, say like you know like she likes gooey and she likes super sweet and she likes silly animals that talk. Because one of the poo is great right? But for a few decades of children's literature from the 19 teens to the 1920s pretty much everything coming out of the publishers was very poo. Meanwhile, there were almost no books for kids that took place in cities, no books for kids

that depicted real-world problems, and very few children's books containing messy ideas or ambiguous endings. Stories with those qualities never made it past more. Although sometimes a book could meet all of more criteria, and she would still have it killed, for reasons known only to her. Do you think more, you said she's a pretty sharp-eyed critic. Do you think she had a kind of systematized notion of her own gay keeping rules, or was she just like shooting from the hip. You know, I have no idea.

I think she was drunk with power. Like I think she loved being the lady in charge. Like I think she just loved having the entire publishing industry at her back in call. And she thinks she's right. And she has no doubts about it. Like she thinks she's right. But even as Anne Carroll Moore held the publishing world in her iron grip, a small group of preschool teachers were busy writing stories for kids that embodied everything in children's

literature that Moore hated. Their stories would go on to influence an entire generation of children's book authors. And they worked just a few blocks away at an experimental school in Greenwich Village, called Bank Street. Bank Street came along and said that picture books ought to be stories about modern urban life. Leonard Marcus is a historian of children's literature.

And he says that the Bank Street Cooperative School for Student Teachers, founded by the great educational reformer Lucy's Prague Mitchell, was in many ways the ancestor of today's progressive schools. They believed that teachers should let children guide their own learning experience. And it just so happened that when people trained as teachers at Backstreet, they didn't read textbooks. They were trying to write stories for children so that future teachers would really know from their own experience what kinds of stories are meaningful to kids stories for children. So the future teachers would really know from their own

experience what kinds of stories are meaningful to kids at different ages. And when the teachers tried to write stories for the youngest kids at Bank Street, they noticed something important. Children are interested in the world they find themselves in. Certainly there are children who have flights of fancy and think about dragons and wizards and whatnot. But anyone who's had a four-year-old knows that often the thing that is most interesting to them is the garbage truck that comes by every Tuesday afternoon. So instead of a book about magical realms, a book published by Bank Street would be about the child's more immediate world, focusing on the kinds of things that small children

in cities really, really like, like street cars and a trip to the grocery store and steam shovels. Designed for the very young, these stories rarely had plots. They were more like games, circular, interactive and open-ended. Plot wasn't the most important thing at Bank Street. Much more important was being invited to participate. Bank Street stories might depict a jackhammer or a train going by and then ask the child to imitate those sounds, but also any other sounds they might feel like imitating. Giving the child an opening to expand them, you know, infinitely, if they wanted to, not just sit there and listen to the once upon a time story. All of which pretty much stood in diametric opposition to the philosophy of Ancaro Mor.

The idea that the everyday life of a child with no magic whatsoever involved in it is something that ought to be immortalized in a children's book. Definitely was not Ancaro Mor's speed. To more, these plotless games for the very young, with their emphasis on experience over imagination, simply didn't count as literature. She made sure they weren't included in her annual list of best books.

She didn't even dain't write her usual scathing review. In the very first Bank Street books, I'll be here in now series, stayed off the library shelves. But Bank Street's earliest stories had another more fundamental problem. I think the stories in the first year now book, they're boring. Mac Barnett is the author of over 40 children's books. And he says that from the point of view of craft, which is to say, of actually capturing

a kid's attention, Bank Street's first attempts at children's literature were terrible. Although they were new at the time and feel sort of radical, they are being written according to a formula. You can see the philosophy, they're theory driven. The writing in most of these early stories came across as stiff and formulaic. There were only occasional illustrations with no real interplay between image and words. And every story started with an introduction describing his pedagogical intent. Here's one from a chapter called The Sky Scraper.

The story tries to assemble into a related form, many facts well known to seven-year-olds and to present the whole as a modern industrial process. So like, right there, like, as soon as your story begins with a mission statement, it's already over. Like, the thing is lying on the floor. The writers at Bank Street were just as blinded by their own dogma, as Anne Carole Moore,

and with the same end result. Their stories could never achieve their high-minded aspirations, because they felt stale and doctrinaire. But in the 1930s, one person managed to make the Bank Street style come alive. The future author of Good Night Moon. Margaret Wise Brown was a teacher at Bank Street who didn't want to be a teacher. She wanted to be a famous literary writer. She wanted her short stories to be published in the New Yorker,

but that wasn't going to happen. And honestly, neither was the teaching thing. Like all of her evaluations say, like, you know, she's, I don't think she's going to be a great teacher. So she couldn't write for adults and she couldn't teach kids. But when Margaret Wise Brown tried to write Bank Street stories for kids, something weird happened. They were good. In Brown's hands, these stories for the very young, with their circular rhythms and game-like structures, were transformed into something new.

The big bank street realization, I think, from Margot Liesbrown, is that through talking to kids, she discovered her purpose as a writer because she found that kids are the best audience for poetry. Margot Lies Brown's books were more than stories or games. They were poems for children who were still open to novel ways of seeing and describing the world around them. Consider a story from a series of books Brown first started in collaboration with Bankstreet, the noisy books.

The story is about a little dog who hears a tiny, almost imperceptible noise and tries to identify it. Brown asked the reader to guess what the sound might be, but instead of suggesting things that we might think of as making sounds, she points to things that don't. So it says, was it butter, melting? Was it a little blue flower growing? Was it a skyscraper scraping the sky? The early Bank Street books would have simply asked the reader to register that a skyscraper was tall, but Brown was encouraging them to perceive it in an entirely new poetic fashion.

Sky-Scriper scraping the sky and suddenly you can hear it. Brown was also a master of writing poetry that worked in tandem with the art in a book, particularly by deploying page turns. Your average contemporary children's picture book will contain 14 page turns, and most authors will use these moments to build suspense. If you wanna know what happens, you gotta turn the page. But Markerwise Brown's page turns, just as often zigzag, setting up patterns

and then breaking them. So you get, was it an ant crawling? Was it a B wondering? Page turn. Was it an elephant tiptoeing down the stairs? And you move across that page turn from this very intimate domestic scene of a dog, very small on the page listening at the stairs, to this giant two-page spread, this elephant, and the scale is gigantic. He barely fits in the frame. Pages turns like these can be disorienting,

and that's the point. You feel like you're constantly crashing into new worlds and discovering new things, which, again, like that's what being a kid feels like a lot of the time. Brown also helped change the look and feel of children's books. As an editor at Scott Publishing, a small imprint associated with Fang Street, she developed one of the first tactile books featuring lambs with real toy bells and bunnies with real cottonball

tails, turning the book into a physically interactive object. But perhaps Margaret Wise Brown's greatest accomplishment was bridging the divide between the two factions of children's literature. Her stories provided the interactive experiences focusing on everyday things, but they also contained elements like talking animals, and they weren't afraid to lean into nostalgia and whimsy. So instead of rejecting the documentary realism of Bank Street or the magical escapism of Anker Almore, Brown found a way to combine them. And nowhere did she do this better than in Good Night Moon.

For Good Night Moon, Brown took inspiration from something in her own daily life. Whenever she woke up feeling sad, and struggled to get out of bed, she'd perform a kind of ritual. She would line bed and look around and focus on different objects in the room that she was glad to have in her presence and would essentially count her blessings. She would take in the books on her shelf, the pattern of her sheets, the view from her window, and then when she was finished, she would write it all down in a list. Get up and face the day. For Good Night Moon, Brown simply reversed the ritual. It's a list you read to fall asleep.

What are we gonna read today? Good Night Moon. The beginning of Good Night Moon really is nothing more than a list. Documenting the objects in the bedroom of a little bunny getting ready to go to sleep. In the great green room there was a telephone and a red balloon and a picture of... there's no plot, no tension, just things. The cow jumping over the moon. But then you move into the second section, unannounced. Good night bears, good night chairs. And yet everyone knows what to do when they get there.

Good night kittens. Which is chime in. And good night mittens. Right. What about this one next to it? And then you come to the page that says goodnight nobody nobody what do you do with that and it's up to the child to decide and that's pure bank street and I would say pure magic and Ann Carole Moore hated it. Oh, yeah, she hated it.

Yeah, she was totally opposed to it. By the time Good Night Moon came out in 1947, Moore was technically retired from her job at the library. But even in retirement, she remained in control of the children's department, showing up at meetings uninvited and making sure her policies remained in place. Even when her successor would like to try to change the meeting room at the last minute, Anne Caromore was still just magically show up and run that meeting.

Leonard Marcus says we know what more thought of Good Night Moon, because the New York Public Library maintained internal reviews of every book that was submitted to them. And I was secretly shown the report on Good Night Moon, secretly because nobody outside of the library staff was ever supposed to see them, but I found someone who's willing to leak the report to me.

The report described Good Night Moon as an unbearably sentimental piece of work. Which is just funny when I think of unbearable sentimentality as like the jacket copy of a book you write for Anne Carole Moore. But it didn't matter. Good Night Moon had the stink of Bank Street on it. The book was not recommended for purchase by expert. Good Night Moon sold only a handful of copies before more or less disappearing from stores.

Marrow has browned, not only a few years later, in 1952, following complications from a surgery. She was just 42 years old. But even if she didn't know it, it was right around this time that Good Night Moon's fortune to begin to change. It was the era of the baby boom. Pop psychology was in, and parents eager to raise their children

using the latest methods, devoured books and articles about what children needed at various stages of life. And in 1951 there was the column saying that if you have a two-year-old and he is not going to sleep, read them this book, Good Night Moon, it'll work. And sure enough, 1951 is when sales of Good Nightmoon at bookstores slowly began to rise. And that book was read by kids in the late 50s who grew into adults, who remembered reading that book more than any other book, so bought it for their own kids, who then grew into adults, who loved that book more than any other, and that's how it happened. It happened in a way that maybe is most terrifying to An Carol Moore. An Carol Moore is sort of irrelevant to the success of that book.

In 1972, the New York Public Library caved and finally put Good Night Moon on the shelves. At that point, it was selling nearly 100,000 copies a year. As of 2017, it sold nearly 48 million. Leonard Marcus says that Clement Heard, the illustrator of Good Night Moon, showed him a fan letter once. He was from a mother whose little boy had wanted the book red to him every night, six times, from start to finish. And one night after the sixth reading, she laid the book down on his bed, and he stood up. It was open to a page with one of the color, full color illustrations of the room. And he put his foot down on the page,

and then he burst into tears. His mother didn't know what to make of it, so she just waited to see what would happen next. And then he put his second foot down and just completely melted down. And then she realized what was happening. And she wrote to him and said, my son wanted to, was trying to climb inside your room.

That's how real it is to him. Jillipore said she also came across a letter. But this one was about Anne Carroll Moore. Moore died in 1961. And upon hearing of her death, a prominent editor wrote to a friend, quote, much as she did for children's books, I can't help feeling her influence

was baleful on the whole. Am I wrong? It's an incredibly powerful, I mean, final epitaph on her life. I, I, it seems totally fair to me. She did an extraordinary amount for children's literature and for children early on, and then I think she kind of lost her grip. Lapor, however, is also quick to defend more. And so is Dan Coise. Walk into the children's reading room of any library in the country at story time, he says.

And you're witnessing her contribution. The notion that the library's mission remains to serve children and to make them feel at home in the space and to make them feel like reading is a thing for them is remarkable. And I don't want a lose sight of that. And for all her faults and flaws, that's because of her. If you go back and look at the list of the New York Public Library's top 10

checked out books, a lot of the titles are ones more probably would have banned that she's still been around. After all, where the wild things are, the snowy day, the very hungry caterpillar, they all owe something to the work of Market Wise Brown and the teachers at Bankstreet. But the fact that the top ten list is mostly children's books in the first place, that's something we owe to Anne Carole Moore. books in the first place, that's something we owe to Anne Carole Moore. Next up, the story of a doll that delighted children and possibly terrified adults at the New York Public Library. After this.

Okay, so I'm here with Joe Rosenberg. So one of the reasons why we invented this little code of section is there's often little outtakes from the story that we couldn't quite fit in. And I hear you have some really good bonus material for me. Yeah. And I wanted to save it for the code up because it is the one subplot in this whole saga that is maybe the thing I most wanted to talk about. But if we talked about it in the main piece,

it would just derail the story. Like it would just bring the entire story to a crashing hole. I know exactly what you mean, I've totally been there. Yeah, yeah, and it's because whenever this comes up, everyone is just like, wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wim-wibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibibib Everything that is most wonderful and most problematic about her, all at once. Because Nicholas was this little wooden articulated doll that more like to use to talk to kids. It was about eight inches high. And when she was in the reading room, if a young child was acting shy, perhaps because their English wasn't very good yet.

And she wanted to bring them out of their shell. She would pull this doll out of her handbag and basically say, I want to introduce you to Nicholas. That's so sweet. I actually kind of like that sort of Mr. Rogers kind of quality to it. So was Nicholas like, did Nicholas have a certain personality or was he just kind of in care of more? Yeah. So Nicholas apparently was a little Dutch boy with like a little Dutch boy outfit Which I which I kind of suspect was a nod to the idea that so many of the children using the reading room were immigrants But more importantly, she would tell the children that Nicholas came alive at night and had access to this kind of Magical world hiding just behind this one and so the idea was that you might think you were in a normal old boring room, but when Nicholas showed up, he would help reveal the magic all around you. Right. I mean, that just reminds me of all the types of books that she was really fond of.

I mean, she always liked those escapist stories. Right. Very once upon a time, none of that boring, bank street stuff. Right. Right. No garbage trucks. No city problems, yeah. Right, where you just get the child to the light in the mere room itself. No, you know, so the whole point of Nicholas was to propel the child into these flights of imagination

that would take them beyond here and now into these magical nighttime realms. I mean, that all seems pretty wonderful. That seems like a good librarian thing to do. You mentioned that it was kind of, it represented kind of the problematic way in which she operated. How did it manage to do that? Yeah. So the problem is that, as with so many things related to Anne Carole Moore, there is a

dark side to Nicholas Nickerbacher. And in this case, it's that Nicholas' life was not restricted to the confines of the reading room. Dan Coise was telling me that apparently, after a while, people started noticing that Moore was carrying Nicholas around with her almost all the time. I can only speculate as to what people thought about. And Carol Moore carrying around Nicholas Nicarbacher. There are photos of her just like out in the park in Bright Park.

I assume just carrying Nicholas the doll under her arm. And I don't know if it was her way of connecting to children or if she just had some kind of weird-ass fixation. to children, or if she just had some kind of weird-ass fixation. I mean, I can see, you know, his concern, or maybe other people's concern, but like a generous reading of this is like, you know, she had a cool companion, she had a doll, she talked to kids, it seems like it seems okay to me so far. Okay, fair enough, but keep in mind that walking around the park with the doll was just like the tip of the iceberg.

Because apparently she would also host these dinner parties. And when everyone sat down for dinner, Nicholas would be seated at the table, like with his own spot and his own play setting and everything. And at like at a dinner party where you're supposed to talk to Nicholas, is that part of the deal?

Yeah, I think so. And even Jan Pinbarrow, who of everyone I talked to for this story is probably the most ardent defender of Anchor Elmore, admitted that this could be a challenge for more friends and colleagues. It's been said that some people didn't like Nicholas because she did, I think, sometimes hide behind him. Like, if she didn't want to give someone bad news She might say oh Nicholas doesn't like that You know so I can imagine how that would great on a person Me too Yeah, so you mean you can see where this is going right because like when Nicholas disapproved of something

Whether it was like at a party or a work meeting, you were still expected to respond and apologize or whatever, because this is Ann Carole Moore. Remember, she is this titan of children's books. Right. And your career was in her hands. So you would just kind of be stuck talking to this doll.

My hunch is that everyone talked about Nicholas Nicarbacher when Anne Carrollmore wasn't around, and when Anne Carrollmore was around, everyone was like, oh, hey, hi, Nicholas, how are you? You know, she, she wielded just a remarkable amount of power inside the library. And so, what would you do if you were in that situation and the person you depended on carrying around a wooden doll? You would be like, hey, Nicholas, good to see you. Have a seat at the table, can I get you a cup of tea? And by some point, according to Jolapour, the whole conceit was taken so far that Nicholas actually had his own letterhead.

And more would write letters to children's book authors and editors in the voice of the doll. Oh my. And they would be signed Nicholas with a return address on the back of the envelope flap that said Nicholas Nickervacher and then the address of the central branch of the New York Public Library.

So he lives at the library. Right, lives at the library. Comes the library, nine at the library. Sure, Why not? That's when he writes his letters. Yeah. That's when he gets his best work done. Exactly. That is that is that is when he's at home. And but so did the children's, you know, book editors and authors, did they write back to Nicholas? Was that like part of the deal of this fantasy? to Nicholas was that like part of the deal of this fantasy? You know, I don't know. I do know that very frequently authors would send him their

warm regards by way of Ankeral Moore. Like, please tell Nicholas, I say hello, because it was just understood that more and Nicholas were like a package deal. Yeah, that makes sense. But you know, despite the creep factor, give a mind that like, you know, kids also wrote to Nicholas. And some of the correspondence and gifts Nicholas received from adults also suggested a lot of people saw Nicholas as this benign or even kind of benevolent presence. So for example, the author of Billy Goat's Gruff made Ankerlmore a miniature version of her first book for Nicholas to carry around. Beatrix Potter sent her these little hand-drawn postcards to picked Peter Rabbit and Nicholas together, almost as if they were friends.

And according to Jan, one of the employees from the library was like this Russian emigrate, and she apparently gave Nicholas like a Faberier egg. Whoa. Like a real Faberier with like gemstones in it type of Faberier egg. Yeah, well, she said there was a gem inside. So I can I go with at least a yes, a Faberier egg with one gem. But the point is that in the end, you can make an argument that Nicholas Nicobock is reigned in the balance, you know, didn't more good than harm. And as was so much of what Ann Caramore did, it's a close call. Well, I mean, creating a character to make kids comfortable in the library is

totally nice and joyful thing to do. Making her employees, adult employees, talk to it is a little odd, but you know, I hope it was good on balance. I mean, I hope for everyone's sake, it was good on balance. So, so Nicholas Nicarbocker as an extension of Anne Carol Moore's personality, did she just take it with her when she retired? Or did it sort of like live on in the libraries? It's like mascot excellent question because this is where this whole weird side story kind of climaxes Which is when the elaborately rendered fiction of Nicholas collides with the reality Okay, you know, he's just a doll and

Dolls can be lost. Oh, no. It was actually an employee of the library who was writing with Anne Carrollmore in a taxi cab, and she was in charge of minding Nicholas and left it in the cab. Oh, I mean, I don't mean to disparage anyone's character, but I'm suspecting foul play here. I mean, if I was the indulged employee of Anne Carole Moore, and I was in charge of the doll who I had to talk to and serve cookies to, I might be inclined to leave it in a cab too. Yeah, you know, we'll never know. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say they're innocent, but I am sure many of Moore's colleagues secretly cheered when this happened.

But then a little while later, apparently Moore just went out and found a new little wooden Dutch boy. And basically said, like, oh, good news everyone, Nicholas is back. Oh my goodness, the, good news, everyone. Nicholas is back. Oh my goodness. Oh, the rain of Nicholas keeps going. Yeah, and so much like Anne Carroll more herself,

Nicholas, Nickerbacher refused to retire. Oh, that's so good. Oh, that's so fascinating. I can totally see why that's in belong in the story because I would be totally preoccupied with it. Today, Nickerbacher and many of the other figures in the story are getting to live a strange afterlife thanks in part to this week's experts. Go to your local library and browse the children's section and you'll come across dueling picture books whose author's names, if you've been

paying attention, will look familiar. Miss Moore thought otherwise how Anne-Karol Moore created libraries for children is written by Jan Pinbro and the important thing about Margaret Wise Brown is by Mac Barnett. Two books have two very different takes on what Anne-Karol Moore was really up to in our reading room. Whether she would have recommended either of them for purchase by expert, we will never know, but a good library and a good bookstore should carry them both. Thanks to all of our experts in today's story, if you're looking for a adult book on brown, check out Leonard Marcus's

Margaret Wise Brown Awakened by the Moon. Thanks also to Satellare, whose voice we did not get to include in this story, but whose book Children's Literature from Esop to Harry Potter is a great guide to the deeper history of Kislet. We also recommend Dan Quistis' podcast, it's all about parenting, it's called Mom and Dad, or Fighting, you will learn a thing or two about kids' books in there too. And finally, be sure to listen to Joly Poor's new podcast, it's called The Last Archive, it traces the history of evidence,

proof, and knowledge, it is fascinating, it is funny, it is really weird, in a great way, I just really enjoy it. Well, it links to all that and more on the website. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Joe Rosenberg with many assists by Vivian Le. Bryson Barnes Mixed The Show, Music by Sean Rial. Our senior producer is Delaney Hall. Kurt Colestetti is the digital director, thrice the team. Is Emmett Fitzgerald, Katie Mangle, Chris Barube, Abby Madon, Christopher Johnson, Sophia Glasgow, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and

produced on Radio Row, which is distributed in multiple locations and houses and apartments all across North America, but in our hearts will always be. In beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. We are a founding member of Radio Topia from PRX. Our fiercely independent collective of the most innovative listeners supported 100% artist-owned podcasts in the world. Fun is all at radiotopia.fm. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and show it at 99PI.

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