Unfortunately, the choosy Moore found Margaret Wise Brown’s then-progressive Goodnight Moon to be a bit low-brow for the class of young readers she sought to raise on traditional narratives like The Velveteen Rabbit, and effectively kill it she did - for a time, anyway.īy the book’s 25th anniversary in 1972, Goodnight Moon had finally made it onto the shelves of the NYPL, and since then, the library estimates it’s been checked out about 100,000 times.

“If Anne Carroll Moore didn’t like a book, she could effectively kill it,” children’s book blogger and former NYPL librarian Betsy Bird told Slate. The influential children’s librarian was well known for her discerning taste in literature for young people, to the extent that a recommendation from Moore was said to make or break a book’s chances of success. Slate has the full story, which essentially boils down to a simple matter of dislike for the book on the part of the NYPL’s reigning power librarian of the 20th century, Anne Carroll Moore. And yet, according to an addendum to the New York Public Library’s newly released list of the most checked-out books of all time, the almost aggressively innocuous children’s book was the subject of a decades-long gripe held by one librarian that ultimately kept the classic off the list.

One book that probably doesn’t? The seemingly harmless children’s picture book, Goodnight Moon. When you think of books likely to have sparked ire among the librarians in power throughout the 20th-century, a number of racy titles may come to mind: Lady Chatterley, Lolita, Ulysses, etc.

Goodnight moon anniversary