But Miss Moore’s taste was particular. She loved Beatrix Potter and The Velveteen Rabbit and was a steadfast believer in the role of magic and innocence in children’s storytelling. This put her in opposition to a progressive wave then sweeping children’s literature, inspired by the early childhood research of the Cooperative School for Student Teachers, located on Bank Street in Greenwich Village. The Bank Street School, as it became known, was also a preschool and the teacher training facility where Margaret Wise Brown enrolled in 1935. This progressive wave was exemplified by the Here and Now Story Book, created by Bank Street’s leading light Lucy Sprague Mitchell in 1921. A collection of simple tales set in a city, focusing on skyscrapers and streetcars, it was a rebuttal to Moore’s “once upon a time” taste in children’s lit.
Anne Carroll Moore was not a fan of Margaret Wise Brown’s work. Brown, with her Bank Street training, was “looking at the mind of a child, operating at the level that a child understands,” says Bird. “She was trying to get down on their level, whereas Anne Carroll Moore placed herself above the children’s level, handing what she viewed as the best of the best down to them.”
By the time Brown’s most famous book was published in 1947, Moore had ostensibly retired, though,—as Jill Lepore noted in the New Yorker in a story about Moore’s war with another children’s classic, Stuart Little—she still essentially ran the children’s section, leading department meetings even when her put-upon acolyte and successor, Frances Clarke Sayers, tried changing the meeting room at the last minute. Margaret Wise Brown wanted librarians to adopt Goodnight Moon; she even blurred out the udder of the cow who jumped over the moon to avoid offending those “Important Ladies.” But it certainly wasn’t enough for Moore, or Sayers, or the NYPL: Marcus notes that “in a harshly worded internal review, the library dismissed the book as an unbearably sentimental piece of work.” And so the book wasn’t purchased by the New York Public Library, and while children were encouraged to check out all kinds of books from the library’s extensive children’s department, Goodnight Moon was not one of them.