I’m looking for a book that I can’t remember the title, author, or illustrator of. I believe it was a collection of children’s stories with different contributors. I know for sure that one of the stories involved a group of animals finding a pencil. They’re all very confused by the pencil, so they take it to their friend the pig, who they believe is very knowledgeable about human matters because he wears a suit jacket and maybe a hat. But he puts the pencil on his snout, and is eventually corrected about the true use of the pencil by another animal who writes with it instead.
This collection or another in the series may have also involved two animal friends meeting for lunch, and one of the animals having a robot that serves them lunch. The robot malfunctions and keeps saying “More lunch!” and serving food that they can’t eat.
If I had to guess, I’d say it was published probably somewhere between 1980-2000.
These are two short stories ‘The Pig and the Pencil’ and ‘Mr Robot’. They are found together in the soft backed book ‘Houghton Mifflin Literary Readers: Beginning to Read’ by William Kirtley Durr (published 1989, may be earlier editions), it’s also sometimes listed as ‘Once upon a Time’.
https://archive.org/details/houghtonmifflinl00durr_0/page/n1/mode/2up?q=%22More+lunch%21%22+Pig+robot+pencil
GILL!!!! THIS IS THE BOOK!!!!!!!!!! Oh my god. I can’t believe it. I’ve been searching for YEARS!!!!! I had abandoned all hope. Thank you so much!!! This means a lot to me 🙂