Seeking a book of advertising-related fables from late 1960s or early 1970s(?) including the first story in which the cereal companies in competition keep upping the ante until they finally sell boxes of cereal containing no cereal, only prizes.
I can vaguely recall a particular picture book from my childhood – I was born in 63 and remember ‘reading’ this as a young child. It was the story of a family on a woodland hike. The youngest in the family was a curious little boy (might’ve been a girl!) who loved to notice every plant and rock, each lichen and creature that marked the family’s path. As you might expect, the rest of the family was often frustrated at having to wait for their youngest member; they were ready to get to their destination and he was holding up their progress! Soon the family realized that they were lost in the woods and with little recollection of how to get home. The boy, however, showed them the way out. He remembered things like the shape of the last tree and the color of the boulder a little way back. He could point out where he’d seen a certain flower or noticed tracks in the mud. Soon the whole family found their way home.
The book I’m seeking was written in the 1960s or 70s. A young lady (probably a teenager) was going on a cross-country road trip with her grandmother. They were to meet up with her boyfriend coming from the other direction. The girl drove, not the grandmother. They each put colorful pieces of material on their antennae so they could spot each other on the road. At some point, the ladies decided to give a ride to hitchhikers who ended up ‘hijacking’ them and holding them hostage as they drove for days. Eventually, all turned out well and they met up with the boyfriend.
Dog lives in a mysterious old Victorian style house that has a dumbwaiter, possibly has puppies to care for, and the book is for young adults, may be a chapter book with several illustrations. Art style and spirals on the ends of letters suggests mid 60s to mid 70s. I checked this book out from a library in San Diego around 1988.
1960s? children's book, full-page B&W illustrations except for red dragon, boy feeds dragon with big appetite with coal, possibly takes place in UK or Wales.
Late 50’s early 60’s space fiction about a boy on a planet (possibly mars) with his pet. The boy needs to get to different city/friends home. Walks via an old highway but the temperature dips extremely, causing the boy to find refuge in a giant cabbage like plant that closes at night, saving him.
I got a Penguin boxed set for Christmas one year … included an anthology of horse poems, stories and excerpts from novels etc. The Brumby and THIS book that I cannot remember. A young woman in, I think Wales, buys a mountain pony and trains it with the help of a gruff but caring veteran horse owner. The girl is very compassionate about her horse and takes it to a pony club day and gets a ribbon for being so patient with her green mare. There is a ring of sheep rustlers going around and they surprise them in the act one night. The girl and the horse are injured but they survive and the last line of the book is “You will know us by our limps” or something like that. It’s driving me mental not being able to find it. There is a line in it when she thought her horse had died and it is something with the sentiment that she mourned her horse not just for her loss but for her horse’s life in the world … that she loved living so much and now she wasn’t … I would love to read it again and really want to get that quote correctly.
I’ve posted on some book finder blogs and no luck so far … unfortunately my parents’ house flooded in 2008 and they had to throw out a bunch of stuff from the basement … up until then this boxed set would have been there. Sigh. And original editions of The Black Stallion, a large picture book on the creation of the Misty of Chincoteague series etc. etc. I try not to think about that too much.
The book I am looking for, a book I read at my elementary school library quite often, is a children’s book, maybe aimed at the 9-12 year old set. I suspect from the late 1960s to the mid 1970s. It was a book of self-proclaimed nonsense, with riddles and jokes and poems and shaggy dog stories, with surrealistic drawings and text. The sense of humor was counter-cultural and a bit Monty Pythonesque. I seem to recall that it had the “As I was going to St Ives” riddle in it.
It was a larger format book, 8.5”x11” or larger, and around 80 pages. I think the cover was a brownish green. The drawing style was in a similar borderline grotesque line-art mode as the illustrations for Shel Silverstein or Roald Dahl books, but with a significant amount of clip art and a throwback-y quality to it. I think the title itself had the word nonsense in it, or a word with a similar meaning.
I’ve been racking my brains trying to recall more about it, but that’s all I can seem to manage.