50’s children’s book about a “Trojan” style elephant, I think named “Packy” for pachyderm, carries kids through a forest on an adventure.
I have looked for this book for years. Was read to my class in third or fourth grade in mid-50’s in Fort Lauderdale.
Thanks for helping.
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.
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 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.
When I was in second grade around 1980-1981, my teacher read a book to the class, and I’m 99 percent sure it was called Run for Your Life. It was scary and suspenseful and it was a chapter book. It took at least a week if not longer for her to read.
I’ve never been able to find this book. Can you help?
Hello, this is a middle grade paperback book I read in the 1980s. It had simple black and white pen-type illustrations. (I think. It’s possible there were no illustrations.)
A professor takes a select group of kids to live for the summer in a school bus near the beach. It is not magical. Everyone gets to choose their own bunk and decorate their area. They study nature like tide pools and write in notebooks.They have to write every day. The professor plays the guitar and write his own lyrics.
One of the songs goes something like this:
Yes is best, but next to that is maybe.
We’ll say can sometimes grow to yes,
but when they say I doubt it, you’re on your way to no.
I don’t think so, I don’t think so,
down, down, down,
there’s no where else to go
but frown and then say no.
They make a clam pit and have a clam bake. They go visit a mansion and everyone chooses a room and picks out clothes from the closet of that room to wear to dinner. One girl wears “paper ballet slippers” to the dinner and I have spent my entire life trying to figure out how that would work. Everyone suddenly sees her as beautiful.
There was also something about how they managed privacy and all the kids created their own outdoor “rooms” where they could be alone and undisturbed when they got over peopled.
I’ve been looking for the following for years with no luck. YA novel from possibly 1980-1990’s about a young lady (18ish). I cannot remember the title or main heroine name but distinctly recall her traveling to Carmel-by-the-sea and the white wicker furniture that she decorated with. Possibly summer time or just after graduation. Seems she ended up going to work for a lady in interior design. And of course there was a boy…
Possibly part of the just for girls series or similar to that.
[/private role="author"]Brandy Hartnett, bhartnett808@gmail.com[/private]
I read this in elementary school in the 90s. It’s more of a young adult book not a children’s book. There was a spaceship that people lived on and something happened, I think the ship got torn in half by an asteroid or a meteor or something like that. I think an asteroid/meteor field was coming their way, so everyone on the ship was supposed to evacuate to one side of the ship so they could seal off the middle in case of damage from the asteroid and a couple of kids or people got stuck on the side that everyone had evacuated from. They thought they were going to die but the side with all the people on it ended up being breached and everyone was exposed to space and died. So now the group of people or kids on the other side were alone. And all the controls for the ship had been on the side that got destroyed. So they try to figure out how to get rescued or land somewhere. I remember the end being very depressing. Their last hope of survival was to get their floating ruined spaceship close enough to the last planet that there were any people on, which I believe was Pluto, so that someone could essentially snag their spaceship. But they were too far away and the book ended with them floating off into space with the impression that they would starve to death. I always remember the book title having something to do with butterflies but I could be wrong. I remember the cover having a purple/ red magenta space swirl incorporated on it.
Instead of cleaning their house, a family comes up with ways to work around the mess, like laying a blanket over the messy floor, and using suction cups to walk on the ceiling. I would have read this book in the early 80’s, but I’m not sure of the publishing date (or the actual title). It is a picture book.
We’re trying to find a story in the 1950s series “Through Golden Windows” about a boy who can fly. My husband recollects a story about this in this series but we can’t find what volume.