Bedtime is "really the final frontier," says Mansbach, who has a 3-year-old daughter. "When the kid goes to bed, you get a little bit of time for yourself and maybe your partner, so being delayed in that departure can be particularly frustrating."
The excitement began after a PDF of the 32-page picture book, which was circulated to booksellers in the United States and abroad in April, leaked into the digital mainstream - and exploded.
It made the rounds online, snowballing in popularity with each tweet, comment, and forwarded e-mail, and touching parents all too familiar with the bedtime struggle.
Mansbach's Facebook page is fraught with digital pats on the back from parents. Some commented that they'd purchased multiple copies as gifts for their parent friends and relatives.
"My boyfriend sent me this as an e-mail a few weeks ago . . . was sorely tempted to read it to my 3 year old that night!! Best book ever!" one woman posted on the book's Facebook page in late May.
The buzz is unprecedented, say some in the publishing industry.
"An event that wasn't part of any publicity campaign, something that was this viral - no, I don't think I have seen anything quite like this," says Mark Rotella, senior reviews editor at Publishers Weekly.
The idea for the book started as a kind of gag among friends.
A year ago, Mansbach, a 34-year-old rapper cum poet cum novelist, was midway through a two-year assistant professorship at Rutgers-Camden, where he taught courses on creative writing and hip-hop's influence on contemporary art. During the day, he and a coworker friend commiserated about the nightly gauntlet of bedtime stories, bathroom breaks, and glasses of water involved in putting their 2-year-olds to bed. The chore took up to two hours some nights, Mansbach said.
