Category Archives: Anthology

356O: 80s Children’s picture book with animal protagonists and moral lessons including the danger of electricity and getting lost

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I read a children’s picture book in the mid to late 80s in the US that was about moral lessons/behaving. Sorry, can’t remember what the cover looked like. There’s probably like 10 stories including: 1. A young hippo waits too long on a train to use the bathroom and poops his pants. An older animal tells him if he pays attention to his tummy and uses the toilet, the other animals will want to spend time with him. 2. A mother tells her young child (sorry, forget what type of animal it is) that electricity is dangerous and warns against putting things in the electrical outlets. A monkey encourages the child to stick a knife or fork in the socket and the child says no, so the monkey does it himself — book shows monkey getting electrocuted. 3. A panda or bear goes walking and ends up getting lost even though his mom warned him against it. The police end up getting involved. 4. There’s also a story about behaving for the babysitter when your parents go out and/or a story about how to behave when you get a new sibling. There’s no humans in the book and the illustrations are cartoony, not super realistic.

355S: Children’s Book, 60s, Green cover?

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I’m looking for a book that I had in the early sixties.
It showed a mom on the cover who was sitting on a sofa in a living room reading from a book.

On the cover of the mom’s book – there was also a picture of a mom reading from a book.

I can’t recall if the children were on the couch with her or were on the floor in front of her as she read.
I think the book had rhymes or poems or stories.  I thought it was green.
Thank you so much for trying to remember this book for me!

355G: Vampire Horror Anthology

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The book I am looking for is a horror anthology of Vampire fiction published a minimum of eleven years ago, maximum twenty-one. The book itself contains two stories I remember, one better than the other. The first is about a cantor at a failing synagogue who is contacted by a lapsed Jewish man whose son has fallen victim of a vampire. The cantor is called upon to help, and tries several methods which do not work, and it comes about that only the father is Jewish, not the son, and the son has neither converted nor done his bat mitzvah. The cantor then does an emergency conversion, then an emergency mitzvah, and the vampire is exorcised. The story is set in the modern-day, maybe in the 90s.
The second story I remember less. It is told in the first person by a farmer on a failing farm about how a farm girl he hires (who he believes is from Pennsylvania) ends up in a sexual relationship with the farmer and his son. As the relationships continue, the farm fails, because “the plowing didn’t get done because we were plowing her”. It is a very explicit story and ends with a wiser townswoman realizing the girl is a vampire and stealing her. The man telling the story realizes the girl is from Transylvania, not Pennsylvania, and that is when the shoe drops for the reader that the girl was eating these two men slowly, hence why they were getting thinner and hungrier as time went on while she stayed plump and beautiful.
I read this book when I was about sixteen, and the story about the Rabbi stuck with me. It is the piece I’m most interested in finding, but sadly the book seems to be lost to me. I apologize for the explicit nature of the second story, again, I read the book at sixteen and it was the only story of its type I had engaged with at that time, therefore it has stuck in my head.

353J: Historical Stories for Girls

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I loved a book as a child (would have been reading it in the early 1990s), an old fashioned one with a hard cover bound in blue linen and fairly thick. I think there might have been a bird cage with a bird in it on the spine. It also would have had a different slip cover when it was new. I think it was called something like ‘Book for Girls’ or ‘Stories/Tales for Girls’

It was aimed at older girls, and had a variety of short historical stories in it, with female protagonists. It was interspersed with full page black and white ink illustrations, but not many, maybe one or two for each short story.

I think there was an Ursula Le Guin story in it, but I could also be confusing that with other books.

I know for certain that there was a story about a woman whose castle was under siege and the people in it are starving. There was also a historical love story where a man jumped over a women’s wall and starts to court her, even though she is married. She almost runs away with him, but he is actually a criminal so she stays with her husband, who brings her roses he picked himself, even though he was cut by the thorns. There was also a Chinese love story that was a ghost story, where the love between two young people is forbidden by her family. In the end maybe one turns into a swan? Or they both die?

Any help really appreciated, I have been trying to find this book for 7 years!

352Y: Fireside Tales (Solved!)

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The book I am looking for is one my mum used to read as a child. It had a collection of books and poems. She had it in the 1950s but I don’t know when it was published.
She thought it was called Fireside Tales, but this could be wrong as the book cover came off. She remembers there being fairies and elves on the inside cover.
One of the stories was called “Fireside concert”.
Fireside concert is a story about a fireplace and the tools. When the fire is just about to fall asleep, one of the tools says let’s have a concert, so one by one they do a little dance or something fun before they go to sleep.
Another was “Little grey mouse”
She said there was a story about a thread-bare Little mouse. I am not sure if that is the same story or the title of another one.
There are 2 poems she remembers. I don’t know the tites but she remembers the words.
First one:

“Closed are the story books on the shelf

The teddy bear’s fast asleep
The sun has gone from a darkening sky
And stars through the window peep
So off we go to the land of Nod
Down winding lullaby lane
With the night light fairies to accompany us
Till morning comes again
And it that wonderful land of Nod
Are things that bring delight
So hurry along or we’ll be too late

Good night little ones, goodnight”

Second one is about a teapot I only have a small part:
“neat and round and brown am I, merry little fellow, patchwork cosy on my head, red green and yellow. Gather round the table now, draw the curtains tight, fireside is the place for me, on a winter’s night.”
I would be so grateful for any help finding this book as it would mean the world to mum to have a copy. We have been looking for about 40 years now!

352X: Puppy Cat

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For years, I’ve searched for this story. It is a children’s short story that came out of an old school reader that I had in first grade. I was in first grade in 1977 in Spruce Pine, NC, USA. I’m sure the readers were pretty old by then. The title of the story was Puppy Cat, I think. It was a dog who thought he was a cat. There are several newer stories that are similar, but I’ve been looking for this particular version. I’ve had no luck over the years!

352R: Horse novel from the 60s or 70s (Solved!)

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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.