In a newly revised edition of [Goodnight Moon], which has lulled children to sleep for nearly 60 years, the publisher, HarperCollins, has digitally altered the photograph of Clement Hurd, the illustrator, to remove a cigarette from his hand.

The article goes on to say that “the move has touched off something of a tempest in the nursery, with some children’s booksellers expressing outrage.”

I’m reminded of Albert Camus’ The Stranger, whose famous opening line is apparently something of a mistranslation, yet whose “corrected” version sparked its own share of controversy and anger from fans who preferred the book they’d originally read to the new one. (Less controversial, I think, was the suggestion that Marcel Proust’s famous A la recherche du temps perdu actually translated to In Search of Lost Time, and not Remembrance of Things Past^*, as it had been known for decades. Although even there, too, there are arguments.)

This case, of course, is different in that the controversy stems from the removal of something from the original and not just from an unpopular correction. But I do think it is something of a tempest in a teapot. Websites like this one, which equate HarperCollins’ decision to the historical revisionism of Stalinist Russia, are overreacting, to put it mildly. This isn’t state-sponsored censorship or the erasure of our cultural and historical identity. This isn’t a revisionism of the facts of Clement Hurd’s life. The fact that the man was a smoker has not been expunged from our history books. It’s merely been removed from the back cover of a children’s book, because, in the years since the photograph was first taken, we’ve come to realize as a society that, hey, maybe this smoking thing is bad for you after all.

There is a solution that gives both sides what they want — at least in theory — and that’s to keep the original, unmodified photograph, cigarette included, but to append a large caption beneath it that provides the complete historical and cultural context in which it was taken, explaining to young readers that, in the sixty-some years since the book was first printed, medical science has advanced significantly, the dangers of smoking and tobacco have grown increasingly clear, and that just because you see somebody doing something on the back cover of your beloved bedtime reading, that doesn’t mean you should try it too.