The Runaway Bunny is another Brown/Hurd collaboration. Margaret Wise Brown was something of a glamourous, wild-child: a spirited, creative and experimental writer known for wearing furs and driving a convertible. 'She didn't want to deep six a book based on one or two details in the pictures.' Take the mouse off the bed and remove the udder from the cow, Nordstrom advised. In an early version of Hurd's artwork, the mouse was on the little bunny's bed and the cow jumping over the moon in the picture on the wall was anatomically correct with an udder. Nordstrom, says Marcus, understood that Moore and other librarians 'were very squeamish about bodily parts and physicality in general.' So she told illustrator Clement Hurd to make small tweaks to a couple of the items in his vibrant and detailed 'great green room.'

Moore was apparently disturbed at the thought of a mouse being born to a human. White's Stuart Little, from being published. In 1945, Moore tried to prevent another book Nordstrom edited, E.B. Moore had an aversion to the progressives at Bank Street, something Goodnight Moon's editor at Harper's, Ursula Nordstrom, knew first-hand. Illustrator Clement Hurd collaborated with Margaret Wise Brown on a number of children's books including Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny. The noises they hear, the airplanes that go overhead, the trains and cars that go by, they thought all those everyday things were wonderful from a from a young child's perspective.' Marcus says Bank Street practitioners learned that children, 'want to know about the world they're in at the moment, starting with their own room and their own surroundings and their own street. Their findings are neatly summed up in the title of Mitchell's Here And Now Story Book.

They collected data by observing and talking directly to the experts: the children themselves. Founded by educator and writer Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Bank Street brought together psychologists, pediatricians, sociologists, and student teachers to explore how children learn. In 1935, Brown began a long association with the progressive Bank Street school in New York City. Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd's classic Goodnight Moon has been translated into more than 25 languages and sold millions of copies since it was published 75 years ago.

Clement hurd