I just read about your bookstore and the Book Stumper in today’s New York Times. Amazing! And I have a book: written perhaps in the 1970s or early 1980s, it concerned two kids, an old house, and a crystal or other glass ball on a pedestal in the yard of an old house, and the kids used transcendental meditation to perhaps travel into the ball, maybe solve a crime or something.
Many years ago, I partially read a sci-fi novel that portrayed a Lesbian society on the moon and some centaur-like aliens. Unfortunately, at this point, that’s all I remember besides the desire to find it again.
A book bought in late 70s Australia (possibly UK published) picture book about a kingdom in black & white & wizard. Under the direction from the king who decides to make it colourful, first turns blue and everyone is miserable, then red and everyone is angry, then yellow everyone becomes ill. Eventually the magic goes crazy and the colours mix to give full pallet and all ends well.
A children’s book I read in the early-to-mid 90s; could have been published earlier. A school cafeteria serves chicken (I think), possibly tenders. The chicken is delicious and possibly addictive. A student, male, investigates the cafeteria situation and, towards the end of the book, discovers that the chicken is made with a poisonous ingredient hidden in the cafeteria kitchen that gives it its flavor/addicting quality; the ingredient is stored in a large vat. There’s a fight between the hero and the evil cafeteria employee. The book is NOT Bone Chillers: Back to School or Eat Your Poison Dear.
I was born in 1965 and remember this book from when I was around 5-7.
It was about a painter that lived on a houseboat and painted abstract paintings. For some reason he broke the painting up into a bunch of small paintings and a buyer flew to his houseboat by seaplane to buy them I think the houseboat was near San Francisco. It was a large book, hardback, and illustrated.
The book was divided into several sections, most or all narrated in first person and each about one of the Biblical matriarchs: Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, etc. Along the lines of “The Red Tent” but young adult and published somewhere around 1980, give or take a couple of years. The author was female, and I think it was published in US (though possibly UK or other British Commonwealth, since I got it out of a Canadian library).
I’m looking for a children’s poem book published probably in the 1950s (it was read to me in the late 1950s-early 1960s) that included a poem with the line, “Elephang, Pelephant, walla walla welephant,” or something like that.
The (few) details:
Adult book
Title might include the word yellow
A short book, maybe 200 pages
Paperback
Read at least 15 years ago
Novel set in Southeast Asia
A woman wanders, losing herself, maybe also a child. Odd, sad, poetic, confusing. She may be starving and mentally ill, badly treated
I hope that’s enough to unearth the title! That would be wonderful.
Thank you.
A large (10” x 12”?) hardback book of fairy poems. I received this book as a a gift in the late 1950s. There is a poem, “Ring Around the Moon” inside, and a large illustration either on the cover or inside of a tree with fairies. It is illustrated throughout with fairies in magical landscapes.
Thanks to the Sunday NY Times, I now know who to ask the question that has been nagging at me for years: what O what was the book for teens (they didn’t call them YA novels yet) that I read in the 1960s (might’ve been published then, but also could’ve been published in the late 1950s) in which a daydreamy teenage girl envisioned painting her room gold, then painted it, then was bitterly disappointed that the walls were in fact “mustard yellow.” I remember nothing else about the girl, the story (or the walls) but the book must have had some kind of profound effect on me, because I’m over 60 now, a novelist and an English professor, and have read many, many novels since–and I’ve never forgotten it.