Many Moons
by Louis Slobodkin
Summary
Princess Lenore falls ill after eating too many raspberry tarts. Her father the King promises her anything she wants, and what she wants is the moon. The King, who has made a promise he intends to keep, summons the men who are supposed to know things. The Lord High Chamberlain lists everything he has already procured and explains that the moon is impossible. The Royal Wizard produces a similar catalogue and the same conclusion. The Royal Mathematician calculates and agrees. Each of them is certain, and each gives a different figure for how large and how far away the moon is.
It is the Court Jester who notices what the wise men have missed. If they all disagree, then the moon must be whatever size a person believes it to be, and the only opinion that has not been consulted is the one belonging to the girl who wants it. So he goes and asks her. Lenore explains that the moon is a little smaller than her thumbnail, because her thumbnail covers it, and that it is lower than the tree outside her window, because it gets caught in the branches. The Royal Goldsmith makes a tiny gold moon on a chain and the princess is delighted.
Thurber wrote it as a story that works on two levels at once, and it genuinely does. Small children take it as a satisfying tale about a girl who asks for something impossible and gets it. Adults reading aloud tend to hear the joke about experts, and it lands hard: three men of standing produce three confident and incompatible answers, and none of them thinks to ask the only person whose opinion is relevant. The rhythm rewards being read out loud, since the wise men arrive in the same shape each time and children start anticipating the pattern by the second one. It runs a comfortable ten minutes at bedtime.
Historical Context & Significance
Louis Slobodkin won the 1944 Caldecott Medal for illustrating Many Moons, which was published by Harcourt, Brace in 1943 and was James Thurber's first picture book. That year's runners up were Elizabeth Orton Jones's Small Rain: Verses From the Bible, Arnold E. Bare's Pierre Pidgeon, Berta and Elmer Hader's The Mighty Hunter, Jean Charlot's A Child's Good Night Book and Plato Chan's The Good Luck Horse. The medal honors the artist rather than the writer, which is why Slobodkin's name carries this entry although Thurber wrote the text.
Slobodkin worked in a loose, impressionistic line lightly washed with color, an airy and slightly unruly style that suits a story about the limits of precision. The pairing of a New Yorker humorist with an illustrator willing to be imprecise is much of why the book still reads well.
Its afterlife holds an oddity. In 1990 Harcourt reissued the text with entirely new pictures by Marc Simont, himself a Caldecott winner, so for years the artwork that won the medal and the artwork in the edition on sale were not the same, until later printings restored Slobodkin's pictures.