I’m trying to find a book that I read in the 90’s. Not sure when it was published. It was a large hard cover book with pictures and several short stories. One of the stories was about a poor brother and sister who had to walk past a bakery every day. The owner was rude to them. One day as they walked by, they saw the frosting machine had tangled the owner, and frosting was everywhere. They helped her and she was nice and gave them baked goods. Another story was about a girl with 2 sisters who were trying to woo a prince. She baked him a pie, I think it was strawberry. And it won his heart. I hope this is enough info. Thanks!

This was the best story I ever read.  I was in maybe the fifth grade, in 1959(?) and it was in a collection of short stories that was in our classroom for when you had finished your work early.  It was not a brand-new book then, either.

But the story!  These two unemployed guys are looking through the want ads, and they find a doctor who wants volunteers for an experiment.  He has a diving board that faces a black window.  The volunteer is supposed to jump from the diving board into that unknown space.  Well, one of the guys does it, but he never comes back.  So his friend returns to the doctor’s office and jumps through it himself.  He describes what it was like:  dim and twilit, with backwards writing on can labels, a sort of wasteland with boulders, and here and there a glowing luminescent ultra-violet hint, not too bright, but noticeable.  Maybe two or three of these lights in the whole landscape.  He figures out that his friend fell in the rocks and was killed, because of the improper alignment of this other world with our own.  I mean, you can’t just jump into it and assume you will be all right.  So he thinks some more, and realizes that the glowing spots are places in our own world.  One of them is the University, and the other appears to be the doctor’s laboratory.  So with great effort he leaps in some way back into the doctor’s laboratory, and then throw the doctor himself through the window into the blackness.

So, does this sound at all familiar?  I’ve never been able to find it again.  I think of it as The Diving Board and the Black Window, but that’s probably not the name of it.

If you can find it, I would be so happy!

I am 66 years old, but when I was in elementary school in Mountain View, CA, I read a short story in some reading textbook (probably from the 1950s) that I have thought about ever since. It was a “Western”. I do not remember the story’s title, but there was an illustration showing a rough-looking man in black who was an outlaw and who was being hunted by a sheriff (I think for murder).

The outlaw made it to a place where he had buried what the reader was led to believe was a treasure box. When he was killed, and the authorities opened the box, it was filled with the dead man’s little childhood mementos.

There was an illustration of the open box as well.

It had a profound effect on me, and I would love to be able to read it again.

I am trying to identify and purchase a copy of a children’s lit anthology I had as a child. The copy I had was hardcover, gray binding with a bright green repeating motif on the cover. Among the stories included was HC Andersen’s “The Wild Swans.” There was another story about a princess sent to live with a family that had five girls whose last names ended in “-belle,” and a youngest sister Echo.