Category Archives: Status

131A: little gnome who scents the flowers

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1960’s/1970’s storybook- This was a short, very colorful story within a book of many stories. It was about a gnome/ old bearded man who scented and colored the flowers. One day he was carrying his glass bottles filled with his potions and they fell into the stream. Some fish tried to help him and there was a young girl/ fairy type character who was with him. Her named could have been Melinda or Belinda. There also may have been a part to the story about some matches getting wet.. It was written in a comic book strip style ( at least that is what my mother recalls.) I feel like the book was red and white and don’t remember the other stories.

 

130B: Stumpy ballerina girls (Solved!)

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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.

129B: Book possibly called Up from Nowhere

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This book is likely 25 years old or more, written by a man who got kicked out of Marine boot camp, and had to wear a pink suit of some sort in front of his former class of recruits.  That was one of his low points.  I saw an interview of him on television after he had made good in life.  It is his story of redemption.

 

129A: Kitten wins contest when washed in bluing

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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!

 

128B: Girl alone for Summer

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From the ‘70s or early ‘80s. A girl goes by herself to live with a relative (grandma or aunt) but when she arrives, the relative isn’t there for some reason, and nothing was communicated to the girl’s mother, so she decides to stay in the relative’s house and do things on her own. She cooks, cleans, does grocery shopping, etc., and tells the people of the town that her relative is at home and the girl is just doing all the errands. It’s NOT Charley or The Girl Who Ran Away.

 

128A: short story read about 40 years ago

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I’m trying to figure out the title and author of a short story I read about 40 years ago in a collection of short stories.  It was about an old woman who lives alone in Japan? China?  I think the old woman is from America.  She has a lovely garden but is very upset because some kind of animal is sleeping in her flower beds and ruining her flowers.  She hires a night watchman who’s supposed to go around at night making noise to keep the animal away from her garden.  She is very demanding and critical of the watchman; she wants things done just so.  The old woman feels the night watchman is lazy, etc…She continues to get more and more frustrated and near the end of the story she goes out to see what he’s doing and finds that he is the one who has been sleeping in her flower beds and ruining everything. She runs away screaming and jumps off a cliff (this now sounds very over dramatic, but it seemed to work in the story.)  The night watchman later reports that he saw an angel running toward the cliff…

 

I have a vague memory that the story might have been called “The Angel,” and an even vaguer recollection that the story’s author might have been Pearl Buck — BUT, it was definitely a short story and it WASN’T The Fighting Angel, the novel Buck wrote that was loosely based on her father’s life as a missionary.