In the early sixties I read a green cloth hardback of two boys who drink something in their dad’s basement lab. As they head out to play they suddenly become tiny. Trying to cross the yard they train a dragonfly with blinders to carry them. Written for maybe fourth grade.
(Surely inspired ‘shrunk the kids’, tho can’t confirm.)
I don’t have the answer but I’ve been looking for this book, too. I didn’t remember the drinking part. I feel like it might have been part of a series.
Sounds a little like “Danny Dunn and the Smallifying Machine” but that was a device, not a potion, IIRC. It’s been years since I read that.
Danny Dunn and the smallifying machine by Jay williams? It might also have been called Danny Dunn and the incredible shrink ray.
It’s “The Boys Who Vanished” by John F. Carson. I loved that as a boy and have tried to find reasonably priced copies, so far with no success.
Elvira Woodruff’s -Awfully Short for the Fourth Grade is about a boy who wishes he was the size of his army men and ends up shrunken to toy size, where he has adventures. It came out in the 80s though, so I guess it’s too late.
The Danny Dunn shrinking title though was around in the 60s, and it does have dragonflies on the cover from that time.
Danny Dunn and the Smallifying Machine has a 1969 copyright, later than the “early sixties” date mentioned in the original question. I’m surprised I missed that one, having read a lot of Danny Dunn books growing up. I’d have been 12 when the Smallifying Machine was published, and guess I was just outside of the Danny Dunn reading age range by the time then.
The Boys Who Vanished came out in 1959, so fits the bill for the original question. The boys in this book do drink something from the lab one of their fathers works in. They use blinders on a flying insect, though I remember it as a butterfly rather than a dragonfly.
I do wish I’d know about some of the books you mentioned when my own son was younger. They’d have been great read aloud selections.