Category Archives: Picture Book

368O: Fixing Broken Things

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I’m looking for a favorite book from my father’s childhood. He says he was around 1st grade when he read it, which would put that between 1971-1974. He read it in school, possibly in a group reading situation. It was a hardback or board-book around the size of a magazine or slightly smaller. The cover may have been white with an illustration of a man and some of the things he fixed. The book itself was illustrated in full (or near full) color with defined lines. He remembers that the shoes were brown; the car was black; and the house was white, pink, yellow, or orange.
The plot was that a younger man, maybe blonde, would find things at a garbage dump and fix them. He fixed a pair of shoes, a piano, a car, and a house. There may have been other things too. An older man, wearing a suit and maybe glasses, had thrown the things out and would come by after the younger man fixed them and try to claim them even though he had thrown them away.
Thank you in advance!

368L: Childrens illustrated book 80s or 90s small perspectives

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Children’s book published I believe in the late 80s early to mid 90s. It was a large paperback picture book. The illustrations were incredibly complex and rich and painterly. It was based in the woods and the surrounding areas. And was I think, through the perspective of a little creature like a mouse. Everything was small but five perspective looked big if that makes sense. So like a little beetle would be the size of a dog kind of thing. There was a scene in a clearing in the woods. There was a little house on a tiny pond with a boat that went to it. And there was a scene in a meadow at night. Each scene would cover the entire two pages that you saw. And for every scene there would be a key off to the side with a list of all of the items that you were supposed to help the main character find. They would have magical properties but they were all things that existed in real nature like deadly nightshade, cobwebs ( not all like scary stuff but those are the two things I can’t remember).
illustrations were super intricate and all of the little items were hidden but not like hidden blueberry was a dogs eye or something, hidden in this really great way that seemed very real and also very hard to find the item so it was actually challenging to search which made it so fun. It was absolutely beautiful and so immersive for a little person’s imagination.

368K: Underwater Treasure Chest With A Single Doubloon

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This is an illustrated book from the 80’s or more likely the 70’s. It entails a boy who rows his dinghy into the ocean. He spots something on the sea floor and dives down to find a treasure chest. He discovers that there’s a hole in the bottom of the chest so that there’s nothing in it save for a single doubloon. That either happens in the boat or back at the harbor — I think I recall an older sailor explaining the doubloon to him. It had beautiful art — especially the water refraction effects. I would love to show this book to my son.

368G: Searching for a Children’s Book with a Valentines Day Theme

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1950s or early 1960s children’s picture book. Little boy has some sort of issue on Valentines Day; maybe a fight with his brother? I think he loses a valentine card, maybe one that he made. I remember an illustration of him in his pajamas outside in the snow. I think he finds the missing valentine outside in the snow. 

367Z: The Rainy Day

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I’m looking for a book that probably came out in the late 70s/early 80s. It was illustrated with primarily line art, orange and yellow colors. A little girl lived with her parents in an apartment (I think?) and had a rainy day. She went outside to play in the rain, came inside for a bath and soup. It is such a simple book but it always comforted me because the family stayed home and made their own fun together. Being a child of divorce, this was foreign to me. I’d dearly love to find it again.

367Y: The Slimey Monster’s Weak Spot (Solved!)

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I’m in the UK & I read this book as a child in 90’s, it was a collection of stories but not a huge collection. It was a picture book.

The main story I remember is a boy going into a slimey castle that had been taken over by a monster with tentacles. There was slime everywhere, he found the centre of the monster & it was a big eye & he stabbed it with a sword right into the eye. This killed the monster & covered the boy in slime. He crawled out of the castle & then washed himself off in a river. I think there was a friendly dragon there too.

Other stories in this were a ufo kidnapping a boy & a monkey having nightmares, construction robots shaped like dinosaurs & an artificial horse with a lever in its back. It was an odd collection of stories, not classic.

367T: Fantasy creatures sing boy to sleep, get stolen, then rescued

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I am looking for a children’s picture book from the late 1970s, early 1980s. The book was on natural/beige paper with brown line drawings. The story was a fantasy where a young boy lives in a small cottage. Every night, flying creatures (birds? harpy-like things?) fly over his home and sing him to sleep. Possibly as the sun sets. They sing the same song every night. The lyrics were along the lines of “Remember my friend of the song of your heart. Remember my friend, for the rest of your life. Love conquers all, for it never grows dim. Love conquers all, for all time”. The book came with a cassette tape and my siblings and I could probably hum the song to this day. One night, the bird things don’t come and sing. The boy gets worried. He hears knocking at his door or window. It is a talking animal or non-human of some sort. He hears that the local monster thing that lives in a cave or mountain through the woods has stolen the bird things and plans to eat them and/or make them sing only for him. The boy says, “We must get them back. We must!”. The boy climbs on the back of a horse or four-legged animal and they race through the woods to the cave/mountain. The boy sneaks into the cave where the bird things are in cages. He releases them somehow and they escape. Not sure what happens to the monster thing. The book ends as the bird things once again fly over his house and sing him to sleep. I want to say that the monster thing is a Gorgon but I’ve maybe conflated Greek myths later on with this early fantasy children’s book. Or, it is a really well known adaptation and this will be an easy solve.