A Treasured Tome

I discovered “Goodnight Moon” the way so many other new mothers do--when it was given to me as a shower gift.

Margaret Wise Brown’s magical book is something mothers share, like the wisdom of giving your newborn an escape hatch in the form of a middle name and assurance that parental lack of sleep is rarely fatal.

“Goodnight Moon” is the present that lasts long after you find out that the labels on adorable footed sleepers lie: the six-month size is already too small by the time you think your baby is ready to wear it. Whispered into the sweet hair of generations of sleepy toddlers, ‘Goodnight Moon” is never outgrown. It segues from being the world’s most charming soporific to being a favorite memory.

Decades after they first hear its soothing sounds, 30-year-olds can recite it as readily as “Conjunction Junction.”

Pages Books for Children in Tarzana is celebrating the book’s golden anniversary Saturday with a story time birthday party. There is also a special anniversary edition of the book, from publisher Harper-Collins, with an illuminating essay on its creation by Brown biographer Leonard S. Marcus.

As Marcus explains, Brown’s masterpiece was born all in a rush, like Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” One of a circle of avant-garde thinkers whose views of childhood were shaped by New York’s Bank Street School, Brown awakened one morning and wrote the entire text, almost as it was published.

Brown and her revolutionary colleagues wanted to reinvent children’s literature. Rejecting fairy tales and Victorian sentimentality, they would make books grounded in the here and now of a child’s actual experience.

You didn’t need pixies or monsters in this brave new world of baby books. An ordinary brush or bowl of mush could be transformed by the sense of wonder that a child brings to discovering his or her room-sized universe.

According to Marcus, much of what’s being published for children today, including board books, can be traced to this dramatic shift to the simple and the real.

Like so much great work that only seems simple, “Goodnight Moon” resulted from an extraordinary convergence of talent, sophistication, expertise and luck.

Clement Hurd’s illustrations may look like something a gifted child could do, but, in fact, Hurd was a fine modernist painter who had studied with Fernand Leger.

Brown and Hurd didn’t cap their aspirations just because they were creating for young children. According to Marcus, the page-to-page shifts in field of vision and scale in Hurd’s illustrations of the “great green room” were utterly new to picture books.

Brown was a striking, flamboyant woman. Her relationships included an intermittent liaison with Michael Strange, pseudonym of writer Blanche Oelrichs, one of John Barrymore’s ex-wives.

Brown, who had no children, wrote more than 100 children’s books, including “The Runaway Bunny” (one of my colleagues recalled that it was in that book that he first encountered the word crocus). She also wrote several Golden Books, including “Mister Dog,” illustrated by Garth Williams.

Launched in 1942, Golden Books helped democratize children’s literature in the United States. At a quarter each, Golden Books “cost 1/10 of what most books for children cost, and they were sold in unintimidating places, such as five-and-dime stores,” Marcus says.

One result was to render less powerful the Caldecott cabal of librarian-critics who had traditionally shaped the taste of bookstore buyers of children’s books. (They would have hated “Pokey Little Puppy.’)

Brown was only 42 when she died in 1952 from an embolism following routine surgery. Hurd died of Alzheimer’s in 1988 at age 80.

“Goodnight Moon” sold an initial 6,000 copies--not bad for a children’s book that received mixed reviews. Then, in 1953, for reasons no one, including Marcus, claims to understand, it had a spurt in sales. Its popularity has been growing ever since.

“Goodnight Moon” flourishes for the same reason that generations of teething babies have been soothed with chips of ice. Moms talk. You hear things.

BE THERE

Happy Birthday Goodnight Moon, celebrating the 50th anniversary of ‘Goodnight Moon,” 11 a.m. Sat. at Pages bookstore, 18399 Ventura Blvd., Tarzana. $5 registration fee may be applied to purchase of books by Margaret Wise Brown. (818) 34-books.