HarperCollins Explains the Good Night Moon Controversy

Posted on November 17, 2005

The New York Times reports on the latest controversy involving digital manipulation of photos. This time, HarperCollins digitally altered the photograph of Clement Hurd, the illustrator of the beloved Good Night Moon children's books written by Margaret Wise Brown. The problem? Hurd was a smoker earlier in his life (he later quit and hated cigarette smoke) and the photo of him used on the jacket shows him contentedly puffing on a cigarette. But parents generally are not thrilled to buy books for their children which feature the author or illustrator puffing on a ciggie. So the new edition shows Hurd sort of waving his hand in the air, sans cigarette.

HarperCollins said it made the change to avoid the appearance of encouraging smoking and did so with the permission of the illustrator's estate. But Mr. Hurd's son, also a children's book illustrator and author, said he felt pressured to allow it. And the move has touched off something of a tempest in the nursery, with some children's booksellers expressing outrage. One has even mounted a campaign to have the original picture restored.

The photograph of Mr. Hurd cheerily grasping a cigarette between the fingers of his right hand has been on the book for at least two decades. Kate Jackson, the editor in chief of HarperCollins Children's Books, said it only recently came to her attention, at a meeting to discuss how to publicize the book's 60th anniversary in 2007.

"We had a lot of copies out on a table, and all of a sudden we realized that in the photo on the back of the jacket he was holding a cigarette," Ms. Jackson said. The company was about to reprint the hardcover and paperback editions, so "as a quick fix, we adjusted the photograph" to eliminate it.

"It is potentially a harmful message to very young kids," Ms. Jackson said, "and it doesn't need to be there." The publisher said it printed 20,000 hardcover and 50,000 paperback books with the altered photograph. No photo runs in the popular board-book format, for younger readers, which accounts for three-quarters of the 800,000 copies of "Goodnight Moon" HarperCollins said it sells annually.

Of course, all this begs the question: why in the world didn't they just use a different, non-smoking picture of Mr. Hurd?



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