Category Archives: 1970s

160I: Old YA sci fi book

2 Replies

\

I’m looking for a YA sci fi book, maybe from the 70s or 80s, about a girl who lives in an orphanage/juvy work camp type place. She has the ability to move thru (time/space/another dimension?). There is a scary, mysterious maintenance man that works at the orphanage who turns out to be a boy shares her same ability, but tried it with his pet dog and somehow they merged beings. She befriends him and tries to help him and ultimately is able to un-merge them, and they have an romantic attraction. There is also an old lady that lives in a mansion near the orphanage who all the orphans go to meet. In the end it turns out the old lady is actually the girl’s grandmother who has been looking for her for years.

 

154F: Kids visit fantasy world with owl mayor (Solved!)

1 Reply

The book I’m trying to find was probably published in the 1970s. It was mostly text, with some black and white line drawings. The storyline involved some kids visiting a fantasy world with an owl for a mayor. For the owl’s birthday, they bake him a cake in the shape of an owl. The owl is horrified and refuses to eat the cake because it looks like him. That’s all I remember, except that it also contained the word “turd” which greatly horrified my mother. It’s possible the book was written in verse, or that this was just one story in a collection, but I don’t remember. I think I had this book when I was about 10, so it was probably written for the tween market. The tone of the book was playful and irreverent.

 

153E: Looking for 70s environmentalist novel

Leave a reply

I am trying to find a book I started to read in middle school, but it is hard for me to remember all of the details because I didn’t finish reading it. It was a novel, I think from the 70s, with a strong environmentalist message, “save the trees” etc. It was about high school students (?), and had intermittent poems throughout the text, including one that went something like “acid rain, like a single tear drop, rolls down the flower”.
It appeared old and worn to me when I was in middle school in 1998, a small hardcover book with blue binding. I think the latest date of publication would be 1980, as it was about environmentalism and the messages were similar to the messages of the 1970s. Sorry I don’t have more details, but let me know if this jogs anyone’s memory.

Thank you!

 

147B: Heavily Illustrated book of North Ameriacan Wildlife

1 Reply

I am looking for a book that I read in my elementary school library when I was a student in the first half of the 1970’s. It was a heavily illustrated book of North American wildlife. I don’t remember the title or the author, but I have photocopies of several of the drawings. I liked the book enough to make copies of the illustrations, but unfortunately none of the pages have text on them to help identify the book. All the illustrations were full page with a single animal. Given that the image of the grizzly includes a frontiersman/mountain man, I searched for things like Davy Crockett, Hugh Glass, Louis and Clark, etc. without any success.

I also tried a google image search. The image of the grizzly returned 2 hits, one of which was in Japanese.

Help is greatly appreciated.