Goodnight Nobody [rebroadcast]

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 ten 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 Roseberg It's made up almost entirely of children's books So the snowy day of the cat in the hat where the wild things are Charlotte's web Dan Coise is a writer at sleep 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 every potter and the source were stone the very hungry caterpillar the only books quote-unquote for adults on this list are in 1984 Fahrenheit 451 and how do we friends 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 the very bottom of the list Dan Coise knows this little footnote 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 only been checked out about half as many times as the lowest ranking book on the list But it wasn't because of live 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 Ann Carroll Moore Ann 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 a 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 like children everywhere in the world growing The 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 this thing guy Dan Coise says you don't need to imagine Theravigtors at the time that there were finally photographs of her taking she was an older lady who looked like the quintessential bun in the hair Shushing librarian who's a really easy villain What does Dan would find out more was and remains a very complicated historical figure because long before she became a villainous banner of books Ann Carroll Moore 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 Jillipore is professor of history at Harvard and a staff writer from the Yorker who wrote about more of 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 Ann Carroll Moore today with all the emphasis we place on it's Stilling kids with love reading it's hard to imagine your local public library without a children's reading room But LaPor says that before more 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 So 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 would that give 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 to library either Jillipore 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? 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 and Carol Moore the crusty old librarian who hated good night moon came along and slipped the purpose of the library on its head So I was very surprised recently to read 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 Pembro is an editor and children's book author and she says that in the 1890s more was the most vocal and energetic among a small group of young Progressive librarians who'd be good experimenting with a radical idea What if they finally let kids into a library? Stockton 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 is you know 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 Moore and They're 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 Moore started by borrowing the idea of kids' eyes tables and chairs from kindergarten's but she took the concept even further She had benches windows seats built at the bottoms of the windows giant windows, but they're 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 starved for nature and they would line up for the chance to look at and smell the flowers when she brought them in Moore took down the silent signs The library was now spaced 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 kids 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 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 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 more could boast that one third of the volumes borrowed from the city's branch libraries Were children's books and children's rooms were spring up even more quickly in the rest of the country by the end of 1920s by one estimate There were perhaps as many as 1500 children's rooms in the US alone and her reach was really worldwide and there are places in countries where People would say well if you walk into that library, you'll realize that that was touched by N. Caramour The spread of Moore's reading remodel was also instrumental in establishing children's literature as literature More convinced the library going public that books like the Velveteen Rabbit, Winnie the Pooh, and the works would be a trick's potter We're in fact art and the 1920s on explosion indicated children's departments at major publishers and it prizes like the Newberry Bell Which Moore helped create? So for multiple generations of New York children And Caramour 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 and Caramour'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 N.Y.P.L.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 Moore 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 what am I gonna spend my budget on You just go right down the list and go I'm gonna buy you know 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 Moore also had a regular review column the parents and librarians alike used to decide which books were fine 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 the Anna-O-Wintour 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 do to flee incorporate into the final draft others weren't so fortunate The story about Anne Carol Moore although no one including her biographers knows whether this was a pogger floor 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 and there were a lot of manuscripts not recommended for purchase by expert because Anne Carol Moore 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 tweety 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 her experience and his or her everyday life They were meant to be little mini escapes into this magical world of talking animals and rabbits and least coats and what not to be honest This is gonna wear most of my experts for this story Like she was a sharp eyed critic. It's just it's not my eyes 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 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 quantities 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 More you said she's pretty sharp eyed critic Do you think she had kind of system ties notion of her own gay keeping rules or what she just like shooting from him? 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 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 more 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 who sees Brock Mitchell Was in many ways the ancestor of today's progressive schools They believe that teachers should let children guide their own learning experience 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 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 has 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 streetcars and a trip to the grocery store and steam shovels Designed for the very young, these stories rarely had lots 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 Getting the child in 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 Ancromor The idea that the everyday life of a child with no magic whatsoever involved in it is something that ought to be immortalized in his children's book Definitely was not Ancromor'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 dare to write her usual scathing review In the very first Bank Street books, called the Here Now series, stayed off the library's shelves But Bank Street's earliest stories had another more fundamental problem I think the story is 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, their theory-driven Writing in most of these early stories can cross as stiff and formulaic They're 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 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 right there, as soon as your story begins with a mission statement, it's already over The thing is lying on the floor The writers at Bank Street were just as blinded by their own dogma as Ancromor 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 gonna 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 were the bare young With their circular rhythms and game-like structures were transformed into something new The big Bank Street realization, I think, from Art of 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 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 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 dohaku, here's 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 simply ask the reader to register that a skyscraper was tall But Brown was encouraging them to perceive it in an entirely new poetic fashion skyscraper scraping the sky and suddenly you can hear it Brown was also a master running 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 want to know what happens, you've got to turn the page But Marker-wise 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 bee wandering? 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, it barely fits in the frame Page 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 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 But perhaps, Marker-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 Ankyl Moore Brown found a way to combine them And nowhere did she do this better than in Good Night Moon For Good Night Moon, Brown did inspiration from something in her own daily life Whenever she woke up feeling sad and struggled to get out of bed She performed 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 the 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, a little bunny getting ready to go to sleep In the great green room, there was a telephone What? And a red balloon in 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 neatens Right, what about this one next to it? And then you come to the page that says Good Night Nobody Nobody Well, what do you do with that?

And it's up to the child to decide And that's Pure Bank Street Um, and I would say Pure Magic And Carole Moore hated it Oh yeah, she hated it, yeah Uh, 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 change the meeting room at the last minute Uh, and Carole Moore was still just magically show up and run that meeting Leonard Marcus says we know what Moore 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 was 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 Andrew 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 Marliss Brown died 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 fortunes began 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 a column saying that if you have a two-year-old and he or she is not going to read them this book, Good Night Moon It's really, it'll work And sure enough, 1951 is when sales of Good Night Moon 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 Ankerl Moore Ankermour 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 had sold nearly 48 million Leonard Marcus says that Unheard, the illustrator of Good Night Moon, showed him a fan letter once His from a mother who's a little boy had wanted the book read to him every night, six times, for 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 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 Jill Lepore says she also came across the letter But this one was about Anne 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? 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 Lepore however is also quick to defend Moore And so is Dan Coise Walking to 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 to 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 checkdown books A lot of the titles are ones more 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 Mark White's Brown and the teachers at Bank Street The fact that the top 10 list is mostly children's books in the first place That's something we owe to Andrew Moore Next up, the story of a doll that delighted children and possibly terrified adults at the New York Public Library After this The respiratory therapist adjusting your oxygen, the dietary aid who knows your diabetic The personal support worker helping your loved one live independently These are the allied support and community health professionals who care for patients every day In our hospitals, labs and local health centers But today, Pronex shortage doesn't burn out or pushing them to the breaking point It's time to stand out for the whole team that keeps care alive Support them at heartbeatofcare.ca A message from the National Union of Public and General Employees 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 Uh yeah, and I wanted to save it for the code out 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 gradual I know exactly what you mean, I'm totally but there Yeah, and it's like whenever this comes up Everyone is just like, whoa, whoa, whoa, it's stopped What? And it is the story of Nicholas Knickerbacher I already love it So who is Nicholas Knickerbacher and how does it fit into the story? So Nicholas Knickerbacher was this creation of Anne Carromore That perhaps represents 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 Who's that 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 Um, so was Nicholas like, did Nicholas have a certain personality or was he just kind of Anne Carromore? 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 Hmm But more importantly, she would tell the children that Nicholas came alive at night And had access to this kind of magical world Hagging 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 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 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 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 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 Andrew Moore There is a dark side to Nicholas Knickerbacher And in this case, it's that Nicholas's 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 Like almost all the time I can only speculate as to what people thought about And Carol Moore carrying around Nicholas Knickerbacher There were 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 Well, 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 place 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 Pienborough, who everyone I talked to for this story is probably the most ardent defender of anchor Moore Inmitted that this could be a challenge for Moore's 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 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 Anne Carroll Moore, remember she has 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 talks about Nicholas Knickerbacher when Anne Carroll Moore wasn't around And when Anne Carroll Moore 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 ya Have a seat at the table, can I get you a cup of tea? And by some point, according to Jillipore, the hall can see 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 And they would be signed Nicholas with a return address on the back of the envelope flap That said Nicholas Knickerbacher and then the address of the central branch of the New York Public Library So he lives at the library?

He lives at the library, he comes alive at night in the library Sure, why not? It's when he writes his letters, he gets his best work done Exactly, that is when he's at home But did the children's book editors and authors, did they write back to Nicholas? Was that like part of the deal of his fantasy? You know, I don't know I do know that very frequently authors would send him their warmer guards by way of anchor or more like Please tell Nicholas I say hello Because it was just understood that Moore and Nicholas were like a package deal That makes sense But you know, despite the creep factor Do you mind like, you know, kids also wrote to Nicholas, right?

Yeah, and some of the correspondents and guests 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 anchor all more 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 Um, almost as if they were friends and according to Jan one of the employees from the library It was like this Russian emigre and she apparently gave Nicholas like a faberj egg Whoa like a real faberj with like gemstones in it type of faberj egg Yeah, well, she said there was a gem inside So I'm gonna go with at least a yes a faberj egg with one gem But the point is is that in the end you can make an argument that Nicholas Knickerbacher's reign in the balance You know, did more good than her and as was so much of what Anker Moore did it's it's a close call 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 so Nicholas Knickerbacher as an extension of ankerm Moore's personality Did did she just take it with her when she retired or did it sort of like live on in the library? Is this like mascot?

Excellent question because this is where this whole weird side story kind of climaxes Um, 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 ankerm 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 I mean if I was the adult employee of ankerm 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. Oh the rain of Nicholas keeps going Yeah, and so much like anchor or herself Nicholas Knickerbacher refused to retire. Oh, that's so good That's so fascinating.

I can totally see why that's in along the story because I would be totally preoccupied with it Today Nicholas Knickerbacher and many of the other figures in the story are getting to live a strange afterlife Thanks in part so 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 more thought otherwise How ankerl Moore created libraries for children is written by Jen Pindro and the important thing about market wise brown is by Mac Barnett Two books have two very different takes on what ankerl 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 adult book on brown check out Leonard Marcus's market wise brown awakened by the moon Thanks also to set layer whose voice we did not get to include in the story But whose book children's literature from esoph to Harry Potter is a great guy to the deeper history of gizlet 99% of visible was produced this week by Joe Rosemer with miniscites from Vivian le Original episode mixed by Bryson Barnes music by swan ryan our senior editor is Delaney Hall Kirk col estate is the digital director The rest of team is Chris bruvay Jason d'Elion and Fitzgerald martin Gonzalez Christopher Johnson Loshma dawn jkumaldon on Medina kelly prime and me Roman Mars the 99% visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence We are part of the stitcher and serious ex-m podcast family now headquartered in the Pandora building with an amile of six public library branches in beautiful uptown Oakland California you can find the show and join discussions about the store on facebook you can tweet me at roman mars and the show at 99 I'm P.I. Ork on instagram reddit and tiktok2 you find links to other stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99 p.i and 99 p.i got to work