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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.
SPEAKER_09: 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.
SPEAKER_08: Dan Coise is a writer at Slate. To Kill a Mockingbird, arguably a children's book, also on the list.
SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_09: The only books, quote unquote, for adults on this list are 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
SPEAKER_08: Love that that book is still on there. All told, seven of the 10 books were for kids. Taken together, they were checked out over two and a half million times.
SPEAKER_07: But at the very bottom of the list, Dan Coise noticed this little footnote.
SPEAKER_08: And it just said, you know, fun fact, Goodnight Moon, of course, one of the most beloved children's books of all time, was not on the list.
SPEAKER_09: The footnote was almost like an apology, because if there's one title that you'd expect to be on the list, it's Goodnight Moon. The famous picture book where the little toddler rabbit says goodnight to all the objects in its massive bedroom. Goodnight socks, goodnight clocks, goodnight, you know, moon.
SPEAKER_08: 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.
SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_09: 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.
SPEAKER_08:
And this librarian's name, according to the press release, was Ann Carol Moore. Ann Carol Moore was the head children's librarian at the New York Public Library for pretty much the whole first half of the 20th century.
SPEAKER_09: And for nearly three decades, she single-handedly kept Goodnight Moon out of the entire library system.
SPEAKER_08: That a children's librarian could just say no New York Public Library will stock this book and the idea of like children everywhere in the world going to love Goodnight Moon except for in New York City where they grew up sad and Goodnight Moonless just seemed bananas to me.
SPEAKER_09: Now, at this point, if you're imagining your stereotypical rule-mongering, moralizing librarian giving you the stink eye, Dan Coise says you don't need to imagine it. There are pictures.
SPEAKER_08: And by the time that there were finally photographs of her taken, she was an older lady who looked like the quintessential bun in the hair shushing librarian who's a really easy villain.
SPEAKER_09: But as Dan would find out, Moore was and remains a very complicated historical figure.
SPEAKER_07: Because long before she became a villainous banner of books, Ann Carol Moore was a hero of children's literature who left the world with one undeniably good thing.
SPEAKER_10: She pretty much single-handedly invented the children's library. Jill Lepore is a professor of history at Harvard and a staff writer for The New Yorker who wrote about Moore for the magazine.
SPEAKER_09: And she says that perhaps no single person has ever done more to get books into the hands of children.
SPEAKER_07: And she did so by creating a place for kids to read.
SPEAKER_10: 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 Ann Carol Moore. Today, with all the emphasis we place on instilling kids with love of reading, it's hard to imagine your local public library without a children's reading room.
SPEAKER_09: But Lepore 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 grown-ups.
SPEAKER_10: The late 19th century saw some of the first public libraries being built in America.
SPEAKER_09: 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.
SPEAKER_10: 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 to you?
SPEAKER_09: 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.
SPEAKER_08: So certainly there's no reason for you to go into a library either.
SPEAKER_09: Jill Lepore 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.
SPEAKER_10: It's completely bound up with class discrimination, right? Because it's not really until 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 the century, Ann Carol Moore, a crusty old librarian who hated Goodnight Moon, came along and flipped the purpose of the library on its head.
SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_03: When in actual fact, that was exactly what she did not do. Jan Pinborough is an editor and children's book author.
SPEAKER_09: And she says that in the 1890s, Moore was the most vocal and energetic among a small group of young progressive librarians who'd begun 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?
SPEAKER_10: And what she was trying to do, and this is what's really important, she was trying to provide at 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 a way to address an achievement gap. And she was trying to level that field.
SPEAKER_09: And in 1906, Moore got the chance to run this experiment on an unrivaled scale.
SPEAKER_07: The New York Public Library was building its iconic main branch at the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. And it would feature a dedicated children's reading room that would be designed, stocked, and run by Moore.
SPEAKER_10: And there are just these incredible photographs of that children's room when it opened in 1911. The photos depict one of the earliest public spaces designed exclusively for kids.
SPEAKER_09: Moore started by borrowing the idea of kid-sized tables and chairs from kindergartens, but she took the concept even further.
SPEAKER_10: She had benches, window 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.
SPEAKER_09: Moore especially wanted to provide poorer 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.
SPEAKER_03: And these children, a lot of them were starved for nature, and they would line up for the chance to look at and smell the flowers when she brought them in.
SPEAKER_09: Moore 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 did not yet read or speak English would still feel welcome. But most importantly, Moore filled the shelves of the new reading room with hundreds, and eventually thousands, of children's books,
SPEAKER_07: not locked in a cabinet or in a rich kid's nursery, but out in the open for any child to pick up, leaf through, and read. And if a child liked the expensive book they were holding, they could take it home.
SPEAKER_09: The only requirement was that they sign 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,
SPEAKER_10: and to obey the rules of the library. And it was a kind of sanctified moment.
SPEAKER_07: The pledge turned the process of checking out a book into a child's first act of citizenship.
SPEAKER_09: The room was an overnight success. Rich and poor kids alike flocked to the library. And Moore began training librarians to establish new reading rooms throughout New York, including Nella Larsen, the prominent African American writer who created the first children's room in Harlem.
SPEAKER_07: By 1913, just two years after the children's room opened, Moore 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.
SPEAKER_09: By the end of the 1920s, by one estimate, there were perhaps as many as 1,500 children's rooms in the U.S. alone.
SPEAKER_03: 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 Ann Carroll Moore.
SPEAKER_09: The spread of Moore's reading room model 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. And the 1920s saw an explosion in dedicated children's departments at major publishers, and of prizes like the Newbery Medal, which Moore helped create.
SPEAKER_08: So for multiple generations of New York children, Ann Carroll 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 Ann Carroll Moore's vision was never limited to simply creating a place for kids to read.
SPEAKER_09:
From the beginning, it was also about what counted as children's literature.
SPEAKER_07: So even as she was letting more children than ever into the library, Moore was keeping all kinds of books out.
SPEAKER_08: 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.
SPEAKER_09: Back then, children's titles were only published once a year in the fall.
SPEAKER_07: So every year around the same time, Moore would make a list of her favorite upcoming books. And that list was used by other librarians across the country.
SPEAKER_09: So if you ran a library in Dubuque, Iowa, and you were trying to figure out what am I going to spend my budget on, you just go right down the list, you go, I'm going to buy, you know, one of this, two of this, three of this, one of this, oh, none of this, whatever.
SPEAKER_08: You would use that list to guide your purchasing.
SPEAKER_09: Moore also had a regular review column that parents and librarians alike used to decide which books were worth buying and which weren't.
SPEAKER_10: 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 Wintour of kids lit.
SPEAKER_09: 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 dutifully incorporate into the final draft. Others weren't so fortunate.
SPEAKER_08:
The story about Ann Carroll Moore, although 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 going to order your book. Better luck next time. And there were a lot of manuscripts not recommended for purchase by expert because Ann Carroll Moore had very specific tastes in children's literature.
SPEAKER_07: 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, Moore almost invariably favored magical, once upon a time stories that felt pastoral and tweedy.
SPEAKER_09: The whole point was for them to take the less fortunate into their warm, bougie embrace.
SPEAKER_08: 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 to animals and rabbits in waistcoats and whatnot.
SPEAKER_09: To be honest, this is kind of where most of my experts for this story get off the Ann Carroll Moore train.
SPEAKER_10: 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.
SPEAKER_09: Because Winnie the Pooh is great, right? But for a few decades of children's literature from the 19 teens through the 1920s, pretty much everything coming out of the publishers was very poo.
SPEAKER_07:
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 Moore. Although sometimes a book could meet all of Moore's criteria and she would still have it killed for reasons known only to her.
SPEAKER_09:
Do you think Moore, you said she's a pretty sharp eyed critic. Do you think she had a kind of systematized notion of her own gatekeeping rules or was she just like shooting from the hip?
SPEAKER_10: 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 beck and call. And she thinks she's right. And she has no doubts about it. Like, she thinks she's right.
But even as Ann Carol 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.
SPEAKER_07: Their stories would go on to influence an entire generation of children's book authors.
SPEAKER_09: And they worked just a few blocks away at an experimental school in Greenwich Village called Bank Street.
SPEAKER_06: Bank Street came along and said that picture books ought to be stories about modern urban life.
SPEAKER_09: 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 Sprog Mitchell, was in many ways the ancestor of today's progressive schools. They believed that teachers should let children guide their own learning experience.
SPEAKER_06: And it just so happened that when people trained as teachers at Bank Street, 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 at different ages. And when the teachers tried to write stories for the youngest kids at Bank Street, they noticed something important.
SPEAKER_06: Children are interested in the world they find themselves in.
SPEAKER_08: 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.
SPEAKER_09: Like streetcars and a trip to the grocery store and steam shovels.
SPEAKER_07: Designed for the very young, these stories rarely had plots. They were more like games, circular, interactive and open ended.
SPEAKER_06: 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.
SPEAKER_09: Giving the child an opening to expand them, you know, infinitely if they wanted to.
SPEAKER_06: 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 Ann Carol Moore.
SPEAKER_09: 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, that was not Ann Carol Moore's speed.
SPEAKER_08:
To Moore, these plotless games for the very young with their emphasis on experience over imagination simply didn't count as literature.
SPEAKER_09: She made sure they weren't included in her annual list of best books. She didn't even deign to write her usual scathing review. And the very first Bank Street books, called the Here and Now series, stayed off the library shelves. But Bank Street's earliest stories had another more fundamental problem.
SPEAKER_07: I think the stories in the first Here and Now book, they're boring.
SPEAKER_09: 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.
SPEAKER_05: You can see the philosophy. They're theory driven. Writing in most of these early stories came across as stiff and formulaic.
SPEAKER_09: There were only occasional illustrations with no real interplay between image and words. And every story started with an introduction describing its pedagogical intent. Here's one from a chapter called The Skyscraper. 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.
SPEAKER_05: So like, right there, like, as soon as your story begins with a mission statement, it's already over. Like the thing, the thing is lying on the floor. The writers at Bank Street were just as blinded by their own dogma as Ann Carroll Moore.
SPEAKER_09: And with the same end result, their stories could never achieve their high minded aspirations because they felt stale and doctrinaire.
SPEAKER_07: But in the 1930s, one person managed to make the Bank Street style come alive. The future author of Goodnight Moon.
SPEAKER_09: 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.
SPEAKER_06: 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.
SPEAKER_09: Like all of her evaluations say like, you know, she's, I don't think she's going to be a great teacher.
SPEAKER_05: So she couldn't write for adults and she couldn't teach kids.
SPEAKER_09: 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, the very young, with their circular rhythms and game like structures, were transformed into something new.
SPEAKER_07: The big Bank Street realization, I think, for Margaret Wise Brown is that through talking to kids, she discovered her purpose as a writer because she found that kids are the best audience for poetry.
SPEAKER_09: Margaret Wise 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.
SPEAKER_07: Consider a story from a series of books Brown first started in collaboration with Bank Street, 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.
SPEAKER_05: So it says, was it butter melting? Was it a little blue flower growing? Was it a skyscraper scraping the sky?
SPEAKER_09: Luckily, 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.
SPEAKER_05: Skyscraper scraping the sky and suddenly you can hear it.
SPEAKER_09: Brown was also a master of writing poetry that worked in tandem with the art in a book, particularly by deploying page turns.
SPEAKER_07: Your average contemporary children's picture book will contain 14 page turns, and most authors will use these moments to build suspense. If you want to know what happens, you've got to turn the page. But Margaret Wise Brown's page turns just as often zigzag, setting up patterns and then breaking them.
SPEAKER_05: So you get, was it an ant crawling? Was it a bee 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. Page turns like these can be disorienting. And that's the point.
SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_05: Brown also helped change the look and feel of children's books.
SPEAKER_07: As an editor at Scott Publishing, a small imprint associated with Bank Street, she developed one of the first tactile books featuring lambs with real toy bells and bunnies with real cotton ball tails, turning the book into a physically interactive object.
SPEAKER_09: But perhaps Margaret Wise Brown's greatest accomplishment was bridging the divide between the two factions of children's literature. Her stories provided 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 Ann Carroll Moore, Brown found a way to combine them.
SPEAKER_07: And nowhere did she do this better than in Goodnight Moon. For Goodnight Moon, Brown took inspiration from something in her own daily life.
SPEAKER_09: Whenever she woke up feeling sad and struggled to get out of bed, she'd perform a kind of ritual.
SPEAKER_06: She would lie in 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.
SPEAKER_07:
For Goodnight Moon, Brown simply reversed the ritual. It's a list you read to fall asleep. What are we going to read today?
SPEAKER_09: Goodnight Moon.
The beginning of Goodnight Moon really is nothing more than a list documenting the objects in the bedroom of a little bunny getting ready to go to sleep.
SPEAKER_02: 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.
SPEAKER_02: The cow jumping over the moon.
SPEAKER_06: But then you move into the second section, unannounced. Goodnight bears. Goodnight chairs.
SPEAKER_06: And yet everyone knows what to do when they get there. Goodnight kittens.
SPEAKER_09: Which is chime in.
SPEAKER_06: And goodnight mittens.
SPEAKER_02: Right. What about this one next to it? And then you come to the page that says Goodnight Nobody.
SPEAKER_06: Nobody. Well, 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.
SPEAKER_07: And Ann Carol Moore hated it.
SPEAKER_06: Oh yeah, she hated it. Yeah. She was totally opposed to it. By the time Goodnight Moon came out in 1947, Moore was technically retired from her job at the library.
SPEAKER_09: 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.
SPEAKER_08: Even when her successor would try to change the meeting room at the last minute, Ann Carol Moore would still just magically show up and run that meeting.
SPEAKER_09: Leonard Marcus says we know what Moore thought of Goodnight Moon because the New York Public Library maintained internal reviews of every book that was submitted to them.
SPEAKER_06: And I was secretly shown the report on Goodnight Moon, secretly because nobody outside of the library staff was ever supposed to see them. But I found someone who was willing to leak the report to me. The report described Goodnight Moon as an unbearably sentimental piece of work.
SPEAKER_09: Which is just funny when I think of unbearable sentimentality as like the jacket copy of a book you would write for Ann Carol Moore.
SPEAKER_08: But it didn't matter.
SPEAKER_07: Goodnight Moon had the stink of Bank Street on it. The book was not recommended for purchase by expert.
SPEAKER_09: Goodnight Moon sold only a handful of copies before more or less disappearing from stores. Margaret Wise Brown died only a few years later in 1952 following complications from a surgery. She was just 42 years old.
SPEAKER_07: But even if she didn't know it, it was right around this time that Goodnight Moon's fortunes began to change. It was the era of the baby boom. Pop psychology was in.
SPEAKER_09: And parents, eager to raise their children using the latest methods, devoured books and articles about what children needed at various stages of life.
SPEAKER_06: And in 1951, there was a column saying that if you have a two-year-old and he or she is not going to sleep, read them this book, Goodnight Moon. It'll work.
SPEAKER_09: And sure enough, 1951 is when sales of Goodnight Moon at bookstores slowly began to rise.
SPEAKER_05: 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 Ann Carol Moore. Ann Carol Moore is sort of irrelevant to the success of that book.
SPEAKER_07: In 1972, the New York Public Library caved and finally put Goodnight Moon on the shelves.
At that point, it was selling nearly 100,000 copies a year. As of 2017, it sold nearly 48 million.
SPEAKER_09: Leonard Marcus says that Clement Hurd, the illustrator of Goodnight Moon, showed him a fan letter once. It was from a mother whose little boy had wanted the book read to him every night, six times, from start to finish.
SPEAKER_06: 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 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 was trying to climb inside your room. That's how real it is to him.
SPEAKER_09: Jill Lepore says she also came across a letter, but this one was about Ann Carol 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?
SPEAKER_10: It's an incredibly powerful, I mean, final epitaph on her life.
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.
SPEAKER_09: Lepore, however, is also quick to defend Moore. And so is Dan Coise. Walk into the children's reading room of any library in the country at storytime, he says. And you're witnessing her contribution.
SPEAKER_08: 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 to lose sight of that. And for all her faults and flaws, that's because of her.
SPEAKER_07: 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 Moore probably would have banned had she 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 Bank Street. But the fact that the top 10 list is mostly children's books in the first place,
SPEAKER_09: that's something we owe to Ann Carroll Moore.
SPEAKER_07: Next up, the story of a doll that delighted children and possibly terrified adults at the New York Public Library. After this.
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OK, so I'm here with Joe Rosenberg. So one of the reasons why we invented this little Coda 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.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. And I wanted to save it for the Coda 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 halt. I know exactly what you mean. I've totally been there.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. And it's because like whenever this comes up, everyone is just like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, stop. What? And it is the story of Nicholas Knickerbocker. I already love it. So who is Nicholas Knickerbocker and how does it fit into the story?
SPEAKER_07: So Nicholas Knickerbocker was this creation of Ann Carol Moore that perhaps represents everything that is most wonderful and most problematic about her all at once.
SPEAKER_09: Because Nicholas was this little wooden articulated doll that Moore liked 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.
SPEAKER_07: 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 Ann Carol Moore? Yeah. So Nicholas apparently was a little Dutch boy with like a little Dutch boy outfit, which I kind of suspect was a nod to the idea that so many of the children using the reading room were immigrants.
SPEAKER_09: 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 actually reminds me of all the types of books that she was really fond of. I mean, she always liked those escapist stories.
SPEAKER_07: Right. Very once upon a time, none of that boring Bank Street stuff.
SPEAKER_09:
Right. Right. No garbage trucks. No city problems.
SPEAKER_09: Right. Where you just get the child to the light in the mirror 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 the here and now into these magical nighttime realms.
SPEAKER_07: I mean, that'll that'll seem pretty wonderful. That seems like a good librarian thing to do. You mentioned that it was kind of it represented the problematic way in which he operated. How did it manage to do that? Yeah. So the problem is that as with so many things related to Ann Carol Moore, there is a dark side to Nicholas Knickerbocker.
SPEAKER_09: And in this case, it's that Nicholas's life was not restricted to the confines of the reading room. Dan Quaise was telling me that apparently, after a while, people started noticing that Moore was carrying Nicholas around with her, like almost all the time.
SPEAKER_08:
I can only speculate as to what people thought about Ann Carol Moore carrying around Nicholas Knickerbocker. There are photos of her just like out in the park in Bryant 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. Well, I mean, I can 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.
SPEAKER_07:
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.
SPEAKER_09: And when everyone sat down for dinner, Nicholas would be seated at the table like with his own spot and his own place setting and everything.
SPEAKER_07: And 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 Pinborough, who of everyone I talked to for this story is probably the most ardent defender of Ann Carol Moore, admitted that this could be a challenge for Moore's friends and colleagues.
SPEAKER_09: 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.
SPEAKER_03:
You know, so I can imagine how that would grate on a person. Me too.
SPEAKER_09: 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 Carol Moore. Remember, she's this titan of children's books. 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 Knickerbocker when Ann Carol Moore wasn't around. And when Ann Carol Moore was around, everyone was like, oh, hey, hi, Nicholas, how are you?
SPEAKER_08: You know, 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 Jill Lepore, the whole conceit was taken so far that Nicholas actually had his own letterhead. And Moore would write letters to children's book authors and editors in the voice of the doll.
SPEAKER_09: Oh my. And they would be signed Nicholas with a return address on the back of the envelope flap that said Nicholas Knickerbocker and then the address of the central branch of the New York Public Library. So he lives at the library.
SPEAKER_07: Right, he lives at the library. He comes alive at night at the library.
SPEAKER_09: Sure, why not? That's when he writes his letters. That's when he gets his best work done.
SPEAKER_09: Exactly. That is when he's at home.
SPEAKER_07: But so did the children's book editors and authors, did they write back 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 Ann Carroll Moore. Like, please tell Nicholas I say hello.
SPEAKER_09: Because it was just understood that Moore and Nicholas were like a package deal. Yeah, that makes sense. But, you know, despite the creep factor, keep in mind that like, you know, kids also wrote to Nicholas. Yeah, yeah. And some of the correspondence and gifts Nicholas received from adults also suggests that a lot of people saw Nicholas as this benign or even kind of benevolent presence. So for example, the author of Billy Goats Gruff made Ann Carroll Moore a miniature version of her first book for Nicholas to carry around. Beatrix Potter sent her these little hand-drawn postcards depicting 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 emigre. And she apparently gave Nicholas like a Fabergé egg. Whoa, like a real Fabergé with like gemstones in it type of Fabergé egg.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, well, she said there was a gem inside. So I'm gonna go with at least a Fabergé egg with one gem.
SPEAKER_09: But the point is, is that in the end, you can make an argument that Nicholas Knickerbocker's reign in the balance, you know, did more good than harm. And as was so much of what Ann Carroll Moore did, it's a close call.
SPEAKER_07: Well, I mean, creating a character to make kids comfortable in the library is a 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 Nicholas Knickerbocker as an extension of Ann Carroll Moore's personality, did she just take it with her when she retired or did it sort of like live on in the library as this 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.
SPEAKER_09: Okay. You know, he's just a doll. And dolls can be lost. Oh no.
SPEAKER_03: It was actually an employee of the library who was riding with Ann Carroll Moore 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.
SPEAKER_07: I mean, if I was the adult employee of Ann Carroll 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.
SPEAKER_09: 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.
SPEAKER_07:
Oh my goodness. Oh, the reign of Nicholas keeps going. Yeah. And so, much like Ann Carroll Moore herself, Nicholas Knickerbocker refused to retire.
SPEAKER_07: Oh, that's so good. Oh, that's so fascinating. I can totally see why that didn't belong in the story because I would be totally preoccupied with it.
Today, Nicholas Knickerbocker 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 authors' names, if you've been paying attention, will look familiar. Miss Moore thought otherwise. How Ann Carroll Moore created libraries for children is written by Jan Pinborough. And the important thing about Margaret Wise Brown is by Mac Barnett. Two books have two very different takes on what Ann Carroll Moore was really up to in her 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 an adult book on Brown, check out Leonard Marcus's Margaret Wise Brown Awakened by the Moon. Thanks also to Seth Lehrer, whose voice we did not get to include in this story, but whose book Children's Literature from Aesop to Harry Potter is a great guide to the deeper history of Kistled.
Ninety nine percent invisible was produced this week by Joe Rosenberg, with many assists from Vivien Leigh. Original episode mix by Bryson Barnes. Music by Swan Real. Our senior editor is Delaney Hall. Kirk Colstead is the digital director. The rest of the team is Chris Berube, Jason De Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Martine Gonzalez, Christopher Johnson, Loshma Dawn, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Kelly Prime and me, Roman Mars. The 99 percent invisible logo was created by Stephen Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family now headquartered in the Pandora building within a mile of six public library branches in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99 Pi org on Instagram, Reddit and TikTok, too. You find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99 Pi and 99 Pi dot org.
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