Category Archives: Picture Book

133E: Clickety Clack Train Book 1960-70s

Children’s book about a train. Published 1960-70s. Rhythmic/rhyming book with verse” Clickety clack, clickety clack…..train going (a)’roud the track” It is NOT the book by Amy and Rob Spence. It was definitely published before I was born in 1978.

Additional Details:  Approximate number of pages are less than 15; the colors within the book are reds/yellows. The verses were very rhythmic…you could almost sing them. It is also NOT the “Little Engine That Could” book.

 

133D: Thanksgiving(?) Children’s Picture Book from the 60s or 70’s

I remember a getting a book out from the school library in grades 4-6 (1967-1970), though it might have been an older book even then. Don’t remember much about it except it took place in the fall, I’m thinking around Thanksgiving? and it may have had a mix of humans and animal characters in it. The reason I say this is I distinctly remember on the last page that a little girl goes back to someone’s “ house” that may have been  in a tree stump? and had coffee and pumpkin pie. Definitely not “Cranberry Thanksgiving”, but had the same cosy, New England, kind of feel to it.

 

133B: Little Round Man Saves Children (solved)

I am looking for a book with a story that my brother and I used to read in the 60s. We think it was called the Story of the Little Round Man. This funny round man lived in a ball-shaped house that could roll around very fast. In the story he saves some children wandering in the woods who find some beautiful shoes which, it seems, someone has left there for them to try. Tempted, they do try them on, but the shoes immediately force them to follow them all the way to a cave where a bad witch lives. They are her prisoners! The Little round man has to find a way to be directed to the witch’s lair. He puts on only one of the magic shoes, and, asking his rolling house to follow him, controls the shoe enough to discover where the witch lives, and can plan the escape of the children. The house is left outside the entrance and is spotted by the witch. Intrigued by the house, she steps inside, but the Little round Man jumps out from hiding, bangs the door shut, and orders the house to move as fast as possible with the witch inside (she’s all bones and angles), until she relents and accepts to save the children. I think the illustrations were black and white but can’t be sure.

 

132B: Boy looses marble on family sailboat, finds it as an adult when same boat washes ashore

This was an illustrated children’s book I had as a child in the mid sixties about a young boy who goes sailing with his father and looses his favorite marble in the cabin below.  Years later as a young man, and with a child of his own, he discovers a shipwreck and finds his marble then restores boat

 

131D: book on city underground

This is a picture book on what lies underneath a large metropolitan city, shown in cross-sectional drawings. I found this at a bookstore about four years ago, but it was a reproduction of a book originally published in the 1920’s or 30’s. All the cars on the street level were period automobiles with big scoop headlamps, like Packards and Pierce Arrows. All the illustrations were in color. Even though it is a contemporary publication, no bookseller I’ve talked to has a clue what I’m talking about. (And it’s not David Macaulay.)

 

130B: Stumpy ballerina girls (Solved!)

Kids picture book (large size at least 8×10″) for little girls, about a group of girls, about 4-8 of them, and they are very short and stumpy (e.g. thick legs) with big heads. They are sweet and passive. They do girly things, including ballet. Or maybe ballet through the whole book. At one part of the book they might get sleepy and take a nap under a tree. At one part there might be a group of boys who antagonize them. I read it during my childhood approx 1984-1992, so it can’t be newer than that and it is likely not much older.

Another way to describe the girls: they look human but they have doll-like proportions. Maybe they are dolls?

Update:

“The Little Girls’ Dance Class” by J. Carruth (1984).
I was able to find it through https://www.worldcat.org/ using the search criteria (year 1975-1993, juvenile, fiction, book). At first I tried searching all the “Ballerinas”, no luck. “Ballet”, no luck. I was going to do “dance” next (a lot of searches) but something all of a sudden told me to try “dance class” was something in the title so I searched that and found it! Wow, I was almost in tears when I saw the photo of the cover. I bought myself a copy online. I submitted the request on this site over 7.25 years ago, and thought of it many times since then. I never actually came back to check the site to see if there were any replies until today, and I was really disappointed there weren’t any, so that’s why I searched again on my own. The other reason I keep being reminded of this book over the years… so there’s this interesting physical/emotional feeling I get, maybe a couple times a year, it feels like my legs are stumpy/stubby like the girls’ legs in the book. Like I feel like the girls in book.

129A: Kitten wins contest when washed in bluing

This book was probably printed in the late 1960s or early ’70s and probably took place at the same time. I remember it as one of those very inexpensive quarter of a normal sized books, with a dark olive background and a fluffy white bluish cat with a pink ribbon and candy behind it.

A little girl has just started a new school or just generally goes unnoticed. I think she is extremely shy and lacks self-confidence, and her family may also have less money that the other children. I’m not sure about that. Her school is having a cat show which seems unlikely, but that’s what I remember. The owner of a nearby candy store has a litter of kittens and all of the other children rush in and claim the beautiful and lively kittens. Our main character hangs back, but the kindly store owner gives her what is obviously the runt, a bedraggled white kitten to take home. I think the girl may have named it Peppermint.

Her mother comforts her and gives it bath and adds bluing to the water. The cat turns out to be a beautiful long-haired kitten and wins first prize.

I loved the picture of the light blue cat with the pink bow around it’s neck, especially since my grandmother told me about doing the same thing to her white poodle during the Depression. You took your fun wherever you could get it back then. I’ve despaired of ever finding a copy of this book because it was in such a “throw-away” format. Thanks in advance if you can help!