The books I’m trying to remember were children’s books for youngish readers, medium-size (12 x 8 inches perhaps?), hardback and slim, perhaps 20 pages long, I feel not more than 30. They had text on one page (but not very much, a few sentences at most) and illustrations opposite.
They were in the children’s bookcase in my father’s parents house: at least two titles. I was a little disdainful of them as a child myself (in the 1960s): they seemed a bit basic and unsophisticated to my small snobbish self. But they clearly had some kind of evocative magic, which is calling to me 50 years later. I’ve never seen anything like them since and was unable to google anything of the kind. My family is UK-based, though my grandfather worked in Washington DC during WW2.
If I had to guess the publication date (based on when my father and his siblings were children, and the colour reproduction) I’d say the 1940s or early 50s. The stories were simple tales with a comic or slapstick outcome — possibly of a moral nature. A particular story I feel I strongly remember involves a house filling with water.
The illustrations were colour photographs — but not photographs of real-life subjects. Instead they were photos of model characters on a little stage-set, a maquette complete with props and scale-model model furniture and so on. As with a cartoon or any illustrated story, each picture was a snapshot of the narrative: but from picture to picture while the characters might have been moved or adjusted within the stage-set, the set itself often stayed the same, possibly through the entire story (this I remember less well).
The scenes I remember most clearly were the interiors of houses, sparsely furnished with wide expanses of wall in particular, of perhaps a single pastel pink or green. I think there was outdoors scenes also: when I try and recall the feel of the scenes what comes to mind is stills from the TV show Gumby (1953-onwards — but I was not aware of it at the time). Certainly a similar sense of a flat painted backdrop, with similar spatial relationships between characters and objects and backdrop items. Also very much in colour, though perhaps more washed-out. I actually don’t remember the characters very well, but if my memory isn’t playing tricks I think they had more of a feel of pipe-cleaner people.