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303A: Animal friends eat sweets

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I’m looking for a children’s book I recall from the late 60’s to early 70’s. The character, possibly a bear, and his friends were surrounding a cake that was sitting on a log, if I remember correctly, on one of the pages.  Every time I see a Boston Cream Pie I think of the book because of the icing, I believe.  I think the cake got knocked to the ground and got sand or dirt on it. The character may have also tried to get too many cookies from the cookie jar and gotten his hand stuck, but that could be another book that just blends with the other memory. I received this book along with Hansel and Gretel as a child of maybe 4 or 5 years old. I’ve often wondered what it was. Any help would be appreciated.

302Z: A flower pot for a hat?

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Vintage children’s picture book about mixed up (hillbilly?) family that drives a crazy car, lives in a goofy house, wears funny clothing (a flower pot for a hat?), and paints their farm animals (pig? goat? cow? chicken?) funny colors. The son’s name is something like Oscar Idis Nooney and the other family members (father, mother, daughter) have similar names. It has to be vintage 40s or early 50s. No idea about the title but it was a favorite of my father’s. He was born in 1941.

 

302Y: Strange “activity” book

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I’ve posted about this elsewhere, but there’s a strange book from my childhood that both my sister and I remember.  I say activity book, but it wasn’t really an activity book. There was no place to draw or anything in the book. Here are some details:

*It was probably published around 1980-1985, I would have read it from 1987-1991, and I believe it was my sister’s before I got it. It was about a 2nd to 5th grade reading level. Some pics, some text.

*The cover was a dark blue/teal, the title was a garish reddish color, and there was a knight on it

*I remember the title being kind of long, and ending with the words “…for kids!”

*The book was really non-sequitur, and went all over the place. One page might be a math puzzle, the next might be a story about baseball.

*There was a recurring theme of a medieval knight throughout the whole thing, and he would just pop up randomly to comment on stuff

*There were a lot of jokes about “the author/publisher of this book blah blah blah” and “the editors of this book blah blah blah.” Probably way over my head at the time.

*The last page was a memorization game

*I believe there was one page with a large blue square on it, and a paragraph talking about the significance of that square.

*There was at least one math word problem, and I believe it involved crickets or grasshoppers

*There was a story about baseball, maybe about the history of baseball?

*There was a brief page about lead in pencils, and how it’s called lead, but it’s really graphite

 

As for the style of the book, it’s almost as if a bunch of people with a similar sense of humor got together and decided to make a kids book, but not talk to each other about it. It was that bizarre. Almost every page was a different subject, and the only recurring motif at all was the random knight. The book constantly broke the fourth wall, and the writer(s) would make fun of the characters on that page, or the random knight would make fun of the author(s). Someone stated that it sounds like Monty Python, and it was a lot in that same vein of humor. If Monty Python made a kids book, it would be very similar to the one I’m looking for.

It’s entirely possible that it was written by a group of people, and possibly as a joke.

For what it’s worth, my grandmother lived in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area of North Carolina during my youth (the 1980’s). She had moved there from northern New Jersey in the late 1970s. She was a kindergarten teacher for most of her life.  Furthermore, her sister (my great-aunt) had actually published a few books (one of them a children’s book) during the 1960s, and lived in Washington DC until the mid 1980s. So there were strong ties in those places. The book could have been published by a small publisher in any of those places, and somehow made it’s way to my grandmother.

Again, thanks for your help!

302X: A crazy quilt in various shades of red

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Looking for a YA novel written in the 60’s or early (I read it in the mid-70’s) but it was set in the early 20th century in a rural area. A group of girls need to make a crazy quilt in various shades of red—I can’t remember why—so they had to beg, borrow and steal fabric to make it. One of the girls goes to the general store with her father who is color blind and convinces him to buy a bolt of a particularly lurid shade of scarlet for a dress for her mother who was far from pleased when she received it.

302W: Squirrels in Trees

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Somewhere between 1953-1956, on my evening trips with my father to the Rochester (NY) Public Library on Winton Road near University Avenue, in my wanderings among the children’s stacks, I found at my eye level a book about 7”x 5”, about 1/2” thick,  that had a brown cover with an illustration of squirrels. It was about squirrels and other animals in the forest. But squirrels were the stars.

Each page had maybe two short paragraph’s worth of words – maybe three sentences each.  Each page had illustrations too.  It was the first book that looked to me like a “real” book, not a children’s read-to-by-an-adult book.  It was a book I could read, meant to be read by me in solitude.

I read it over and over. I just remember the squirrels, the brownish-orange of the cover, the lovely large print, but not so large that there weren’t paragraphs. The squirrels were very happy  in their forest lives; I was so happy in my reading life.

Not much to go on, that’s for sure. I just paid my four dollars, though. Why not try?

 

302V: Travels through alternate universes and baseball

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Possibly a book, possibly a series – listened to as an audio book on a car trip in the early 2000’s. The book was from Cracker Barrel (which is apparently Ingram Entertainment titles, if that helps). The book followed three protagonists, a girl and two boys. They traveled to other worlds or alternate universes through tunnels. The other worlds usually had some sort of baseball theme. At least one had a society of gnomes who used it as their court procedures. The girl protagonist was a pitcher. The had a map that helped them find the way – depending on how it was folded, it could show a neighborhood, a city or even be a star map. The antagonists had eyes you could see through, all the way to what was on the other side of their heads – photographs of Manhattan Project scientists showed that many of them were bad guys due to this effect.

302U: Little Mermaid Maybe?

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The version I am looking for has an illustration of a cloud at the end of the book with a face in it.  Not full page, smaller illustration.  Also- illustration with the sisters coming out of the water to hand a knife to the little mermaid.

This is a rarer version- I stumbled across one other person who tried to find it on a Livejournal search.  She googled like I did and none of the google illustrations quite fit.

It was illustrated, only the little mermaid story.  It was a small hardcover book, purple/violet I think?

Thank you!

302T: Hansel and Gretel accordion book

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Looking for a book we had when we were small, so no later than 1990.  Probably much older, though.  It was a Hansel and Gretel story, told in pictures, I believe.  I don’t think there were words.  It was an accordion book, so card stock or heavier.  It was pastel tones, I believe, probably watercolor.  I remember Hansel having crazy curly blonde hair that stuck out every which way, and them having plump cheeks. The book was probably about 3 inches square, very small. Hope you can help!

302S: People come together in apartment building during snowstorm

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Hi! I am looking for a book with this basic storyline…I think I’ve got the details right.  This was a book I read in the 1990s.

A little girl walks home (an apartment building) from school in a snow storm. I think the power goes out in the apartment building (or maybe everyone is snowed-in?), and all of the neighbors within the building start meeting in the little girl’s family apartment.  Each of the neighbors brings something with them (I only remember candles and meatballs…and maybe the neighbor who brought the meatballs was named Mrs. Sanchez?) At the end of the story, the little girl, and I think her father, makes a snow cone with the snow outside her window.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for helping!!! I would LOVE to read this story to my daughter’s kindergarten class at her holiday party this year 🙂

302R: Monsters in Rain (Solved)

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This children’s storybook is no later than late 70’s or early to mid 80’s, it had pictures. There were some evil monsters or something that hated rain and were vulnerable to water, so some people went out to confront them during a rainstorm by putting their coats in jars to keep them dry. The people then put on their dry coats when they approached the monsters, and when the monsters asked why the people weren’t wet, the people said they were able to move between the raindrops without getting wet. The people told the the monsters how they could do the same, but when the monsters tried it the water got them.