Category Archives: 1970s

297R: Big book of stories, almost like a telephone book

3 Replies

I am looking for a big book of stories I enjoyed as a child in the early to mid 1980s. It’s possible the book was published in either the 70s or 80s. It is NOT the typical hardcover collection of stories but rather a paperback, rather oversized book – almost like a telephone book with same type of “newspaper like” pages and black and white print. A distinctive feature is that it had pastel multicolored sections of pages inside. Each color represented a specific type of story like yellow for fairy tales, pink for animal stories, blue for classics adapted for kids, etc. The most specific story I remember is the 12 Dancing Princess who wore out their shoes. It had beautiful illustrations with ladies sporting the French pompadour style with ringlets hairdos and full ballroom dresses. I also have a vague memory of a cute little story featuring a ladybug and other various insects conversing with each other. We also had a similar type big book of jokes (featuring different types of jokes including Tom Swifties!) that I seem to remember having a mostly white cover; I always thought they were part of a series of big books but I could be wrong.

Thanks for any help.

297L: Cuttyhunk Island (Solved!)

2 Replies

The book that I am trying to find was purchased via scholastic books (or similar) in the 1978-1979

school year. Probably Spring ’79.  It was young adult fiction and either the back cover or the description said “Rites of Passage” (then something about learning to drive,graduating,etc.)

The book began with the heroine and her family cleaning out a beloved family cabin or cottage. Her grandmother had just died and she was having trouble dealing with it. A female cousin shows up and they don’t really like each other. Later in the book they become close.The cousin has become cool by sewing shift dresses for classmates. The dresses are unique because she added a pop art twist to

each dress. The cousin would appliqué a hamburger up by a shoulder or a little snake at the waist.

The heroine is dating / deciding between two boys. One is a freshman at MIT / ridiculously smart. One of them gives her a rock from Cuttyhunk Island. I had never heard of this Island and was taken with the idea that it could produce perfectly round rocks because of tides and gravity,etc. For a work of fiction,it explained it pretty well.

The heroine keeps the rock as a talisman ( learned that word from the book ) and at the end of the book throws it into the sea because she doesn’t need it any longer.

That is all that I remember. Thank you for your help.

297J: A boy in a fully automated house (Solved)

3 Replies

Hello! I have been trying to find a children’s picture book from probably the 1970s or possibly 1960s. It was about a boy who lived in a house that was fully automated. (No parents are in the story, I don’t think. ) A machine would wake him up in the morning, put him in the shower, dry him off, put his clothes on, make him breakfast, sit him down to eat, and send him off to school. It was not a robot, more like he was moved through a conveyor belt of morning routine activities. They boy seemed to sleep through everything. One night, the machine goes on the fritz, and he is sent through the morning activities in the wrong order. The machine is all messed up – he gets his hair washed with breakfast, clothes put on upside-down, etc. Hope you can help!

296W: Sci-Fi Retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey

Leave a reply

I read this in the late 1970s. A 12ish year old boy living in a rural area of the US notices small lakes are disappearing in his area. He deduces that aliens are stealing the water to use for fuel and starts watching for their ship, which he boards when he sees it. The ship takes off while he is aboard and the rest of the book is his adventures in trying to return home. There are other abductees from other planets already on board who become his crew. It is a loose re-telling of Homer’s The Odyssey in that the boy travels from planet to planet aboard the ship and encounters people who are recognizably the Lotus-Eaters, the Cyclops, Circe, etc. Because it’s a children’s book, many of the details are toned down. For example, the Cyclops had poor vision and thus needed to wear a thick lens to see, which the adventurers broke to “blind” him. I remember very well there was a full-page painting of the boy in the Cyclops cave, which might have been the cover of the book.

 

296U: Teenage model (Solved)

4 Replies

I read this book, from my high school library, around 1972. It was contemporary at that time. The main character was a pretty, poised girl who gets a job as a fashion model. This scene might have occurred during the hiring process, which took place at a restaurant. She gets the impression that one of the men is flirting with her, so she asks if he has children. When he says yes, she asks to see pictures of them, which distracts him from the flirting so she feels as though she has rejected him without offending him. The girl has a nerdy younger brother and this scene only stays in my mind because a friend who also read it asked me “what are the runs” when she gets to this part. The main character stays home with her younger brother when he has the runs. Although they typically quarrel like siblings do, she feels bad for him this day and is kind.

296T: Foreign college students

Leave a reply

I found this in a public library around 1971 and it was a contemporary book. I think it was set in a small New England or Eastern college town. The main character is a student there and becomes friends with students from the Middle East. In one scene she accompanies her friends as they look for apartments to rent and sees the discrimination they face. She falls in love with one of the students, who gives her a gold ring with a sapphire stone. She wears the ring on a gold chain around her neck. The book ends as he breaks her heart by telling her he plans to marry a girl in a marriage arranged by his and the girl’s family. She doesn’t understand why he would marry someone he doesn’t love and he can’t explain to her why he feels he must.

296S: Buttermilk skies

1 Reply

This book was most likely written in the early to mid 1960s. I found it in my junior high school library around 1970.

It might have been written first person.The main character was girl about 15 and I recall three distinct scenes.In one she stands looking out her back door at dusk or night and sees what she describes as “buttermilk skies.” She might say it came from the Hoagy Carmichael song. In another scene she stares at herself in the mirror before going out and thinks “When last seen she was wearing ….” like newscasters do in describing a missing person. The last I recall is that she crossed herself, even though she was not Catholic.

296M: A machine called a “Spindizzy”

3 Replies

1960’s/70s cheap science fiction. It involved a colony that had female creatures who had evolved pink skin, and tails. Several of these creatures were featured in what appeared to be a painting on the cover of the mass market paperback I had. The main male character was sent by his company to check up on/audit the colony in some way. The female creatures were a second class of citizens who had small tattoos who indicated the type of work they did at the colony. The main male character falls in love with one of the female creatures and they attempt to escape the colony. Their attempt to escape involved a machine called a “spindizzy”.

 

295Y: Young Reader Adventure with Plane Crashes, Loch Ness, and Balloon Races (Solved)

4 Replies

This book was read in middle school. It featured four stories with the same gang of young boys. One story was of them faking a Loch Ness Monster using radio-controlled boat in their lake. Another was their search for a crashed airplane using radio direction finding. A third was their competing in a hot-air balloon race. The fourth I do not remember. This was probably published in the 80’s or late 70’s.