In a great green room, a young rabbit is being put to bed. One by one he says goodnight to everything around him: the telephone and the red balloon, the picture of the cow jumping over the moon and the picture of the three little bears sitting on chairs, the two kittens and the pair of mittens, the toyhouse and the young mouse, the comb and the brush and the bowl full of mush — and the quiet old lady who is whispering hush.
Margaret Wise Brown's text is a short rhyming litany rather than a story, and Clement Hurd's pictures follow it through a single unbroken scene: the same room drawn again and again, its lamps dimming and its colours deepening as the clock on the mantel moves through the hour before sleep, with full-colour spreads alternating with quieter black-and-white pages. Nothing happens beyond the falling of night, which is the point of it.
First published by Harper and Brothers in 1947 and illustrated throughout by Clement Hurd, Goodnight Moon has never been out of print. Its steady, repetitive naming of familiar things is what makes it work as the last book of the day, and it is read aloud far more often than it is read.