Kids book, 80s-90s, a group of kids on a spaceship, something to do with butterflies that accidentally get killed by the youngest girl. I think the cover was dark & either had butterflies or the spaceship on it or both.
Looking for a children’s book I read in the early 2000s. Hardcover story book with illustrations, possibly in watercolor. The book was tan with a dark brown spine, the lettering was gold. The story is about an old lady living her peaceful life, drinking her coffee/tea, eating a slice of spice?/chocolate? cake, and reading her book every night. One night she finds a mouse in her house, who I think ate her cake and chewed her book, which sends her to bed stressed. The next day, she buys a cat to get rid of the mouse, but the cat ends up being too lazy and sleeps all day. Then she gets a dog, but the dog just runs around and makes a mess. Then she gets an owl to hunt the mouse, but it keeps her up all night flying around. Then a snake, and so on. She keeps buying animals to solve the mouse problem until her house is in chaos, but the mouse is still there. The story ends with her getting rid of all the animals and eventually making friends with the mouse and serving it it’s own tiny cup of tea and it’s own tiny slice of cake every night with her and they live happily ever after. I have Googled things like “children’s book old lady mouse in house” and variation of that for hours with no luck. Send help!
I have searched for years for a book I once owned; I cannot remember the title, but the physicality of the book remains vivid. It was paper-bound, roughly 8″ square, and I think there was a good deal of yellow in the cover design. Most of the book consisted of perforated pages, with four 4″-square black-and-white photos per page, meant to be torn out and used as focal objects for meditation (or perhaps divination, in the manner of tarot cards). The photo pages were printed on heavy card stock and had photos on each side. The images were varied: people, landscapes, buildings, etc., all inviting contemplative regard. There were also pages of text in the front of the book describing ways of using the photo cards. My other lasting memory is that the book was the same size as Ram Dass’s Be Here Now (published 1971), so that, once all the photos had been torn out, the Ram Dass book could more or less fit into the space left behind. Since this book does not neatly fit any standard category, I’ve never been able to track it down. Many thanks to anyone who might share this memory with me and know the title.
The poem which I can neither remember nor forget starts off something like:
If I’d been born in Bethlehem
So many years ago
I might have seen the ***
Passing to and fro
I am fairly confident it is a poem, but perhaps not?
It was definitely part of a Christmas story
From the early 1950s?
A book I read to my daughter in the 70s about a man (Russian?) who had a (Russian?) dancing bear. The man had 3 unique things about him: (1) he could juggle 3(?) balls, (2) he was kind, and (3) can’t remember the third.
Book is in English and short enough for a child’s attention.
I’m trying to recover an illustrated children’s book from before 2005 or so. It was hardback, with a green cover, I believe. The illustration style was quite unique and lovely, almost Celtic? Lots of green. The main crux of the book was an alchemist/witch and her apprentice who she sends into the woods to gather needed ingredients for a potion or spell. It took place primarily in the forest, and one of the ingredients I remember was a specific type of mushroom. Other tasks involved something in a marsh/swamp, and maybe something about flying creatures? But what I remember most was the alchemist/witch. She had long dark hair.
– Fiction – Vintage series – 1970s or earlier – about dirt track racing written for kids. It was checked located in the children’s section of the library. Trying to find these books as a gift for a friend who remembers them very fondly, but doesn’t remember details, just that it was a series and of course, that it was about dirt track car racing.
A little girl goes to stay with her eccentric aunt who spends most of her time gardening. The aunt is constantly digging up dishes, plates, and other items from her yard, and always holds on to those items. One day the little girl is in the library of her aunt’s house and discovers a book about a little girl who was at a birthday party that was cursed by a (fairy?) so that all of the children disappeared and the cutlery was buried in the yard. To undo the curse, the story girl would have to place all of the cutlery back just as it was when the curse was placed. The story girl would also be unable to communicate what happened to anyone else until the curse was listed. Thinking that her aunt might be the girl from the story, the little girl helps her aunt to dig up the last of the cutlery/dishware. Together they place the dishes/cutlery on the table as directed by the aunt. However, nothing happens after they do this, and the book ends.
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.
I think this might have been a short story published in Cricket Magazine in the 1980s – early 90s, perhaps with Quentin Blake illustrations? It was a short story that told about a reader that had a voracious appetite for books AND for any food that was mentioned in the books they read. If the character in a book was drinking tea, the reader had to have tea, and so on.
The memory of this story has plagued me for years, I’d love very much to read it again.