'Goodnight Moon,' the Smokeless Version

This caught my eye because just the night before last, I was babysitting for a co-worker's little boy (nine months old, with the biggest brown eyes you've ever seen) and I noticed two copies of this children's classic on his bookshelf.

Recently, a re-issue of the book has included a digitally altered photo of the illustrator, lest his cigarette cause infants to take up the ol' cancer sticks. It only makes sense.

In the great green room, there is a telephone, and a red balloon, but no ashtray. "Goodnight Moon," the children's classic by Margaret Wise Brown, has gone smoke free.

In a newly revised edition of the book, 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.

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.