Author Archives: admin

331W: Magic Boots Takes Boy’s Family Away Into Forest

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The book I cannot recall is a chapter book that my 4th grade teacher read with our class.

The story begins with a small family in a cabin in the woods.  Each night, they hear a knock at the door, and whoever answers the door disappears.  The reader soon discovers that the a pair of magic boots have been walking themselves up to the door, forcing themselves onto the feet of who answers, and walking them off into the forest.  Each family member disappears until only 1 boy, the protagonist, is left.  He manages to trap the boots in a pot, pours (honey or molasses?) onto the boots, and puts 2 rats into the enclosure with the boots.  The rats eat the boots and become "bewitched," and the boy stands on the rats and rides them into the forest to find his family.  He is led to a troll or giant, but I cannot remember how the story concludes.

Please help!

331V: Trailer History (Solved!)

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I’d judge this to be from the 1990’s.  It’s a very fun and funny history of trailers (some mention of manufactured houses and tiny homes, but Trailers).  Partial-color photograph on front shows an elderly woman planting flowers in her repurposed commode, no a flowerpot, in front of her trailer.  The epilogue is, for a reason I’ve forgotten, the story of someone who watched a wolf take a piece of wool between his teeth and back slowly into a lack and submerge himself; the observer figuring the wolf knew his fleas would move to the ball of fuzz (I think lanolin was mentioned).

It is quite a read.  The public library has no memory of it, even in records.  Online there is nothing at all resembling it.  Please help!

331U: Old Woman Who Cleans

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Hello, the book I'm looking for is old, most likely from the 50's or 60's. There is an old woman (skinny) who lives in a cottage or house that is messy. She starts out cleaning one thing and then obsessively has to clean the rest of her house, and there was a picture of the kitchen with a blue checkered tablecloth.

 

331T: Amazing Sweater Boy With Inventor Relative

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I remember (around 1980) visiting the library and reading this wonderful book about a little boy with a striped sweater that was amorphic. He could store all sorts of things in it. He had adventures with another character, maybe his uncle, or some other male relative. I recall big machines, like vehicles with all sorts of ‘chitty chitty bang bang’ style appendages all over them.
The boy might have had a pet…but that’s me just imagining things, I think.
I’ve been searching for anything like this for years to no avail.

 

331S: Black And White Line Drawing Picture Book

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Back in the mid to late 70s I recall a wonderful picture book that I read at primary school. I cannot remember any title or author details, but I do remember that the book was perhaps set in a forest? The illustrations were black and white until the last page I think, where they became full colour. I think they were line drawings. I imagine the book was published in the early 70s, maybe late 60s. I remember something about a rainbow as part of the story, i think this is why it was full colour on the last page. I also think a child was moving through the book. Thanks for your help

331R: Sabre Jet Pilot

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This book is autobiographical. I read it somewhere between the fall of 1973 and summer of 1976, acquiring it from my junior high school library. As I recall, the book is about a young Canadian who becomes a Sabre jet pilot and becomes stationed in West Germany during the Cold War. It covers the missions he flew, but it is also about what led him to flying and his engineering education and career. At one point during college he builds a small hovercraft using a vacuum cleaner motor. Of course, that intrigued me, a teenage boy with an interest in science and engineering. I’ve Googled and googled, but while there are lots of books about men who flew the Sabre, I can’t find this one.

331Q: Children’s Book With Bunnies And Colored Eggs

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It’s a book from the 1950s or 1960s, I believe.  I thought it was a Little Golden Book, but I’ve reviewed all their titles and I don’t think it is.  It’s little rabbits (pretty sure rabbits — it’s not the Color Kittens) who each end up with a different color egg.  Blue like the sky, green like clover.  One, I believe, ends up with a black egg.  The eggs were deeply saturated colors, and I remember thinking how beautiful they were.

Any ideas?

331P: The Book Of Secrets

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There are many, many books out there with this particular title but the I’m looking for is very hard to find. It was written by a collection of authors such as; princes, sheikhs, masons, rulers, kings etc. between 1820 and 1920.

The subject of the book is governments; Advantages and disadvantages, strengths and weaknesses of different forms of government. Example: Democracies, communism, monarchy, democratic parliaments. It talks about different rituals, different orders like Roscicrucians, Knight Templars, etc.
Around 1500 pages
Leather bound

331O: Scary Stories, Author Visited Louisville KY Around Turn Of Millennium

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I remember my family reading a collection of scary stories in our backyard around a fire. The author, a woman, visited our city (outside of Louisville, KY) to do a book reading around this time, and that’s how we discovered her book. This would have been anywhere between 1998-2003-ish. I remember very little about the plot to the individual stories, unfortunately — perhaps one about involved a tree and ribbons? It’s very possible that memory of the plot is just mushing other scary stories together… I’ve tried searching newspaper archives to see if there’s coverage of her book-signing, but so far no luck.

331N: Colored Triangles on Page Corners

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Looking for a children’s picture book, probably mid- to late-1950s or early 1960s. Size of a Golden book, but not that publisher. There were large-ish colored triangles on top corners of each page (maybe bottoms, too). May have had an illustration of a little child dressed up as a cowboy; I seem to remember something about a lasso. Maybe a lasso acted as the frame of a page or pages as well. Bright, cheerful colors.