Category Archives: Unsolved

313Q: Calico Cat and Her Kittens Live in a Candy Store

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I’m looking for a children’s book that I had received in the early to mid 70s. It was a thin illustrated book about a calico cat that had kittens and lived in a candy store. Those are the details I’m completely sure about.

I’m relatively sure that one of the kittens was white or cream colored. It may have been discolored by dust or soot at one point. The kittens were adopted. I’m pretty sure an old man owned the store and he gave the dirty kitten to a sad little girl who loved him and cleaned off the dirt to discover its beautiful fur.

I’ve been looking for this book for decades.

313P: Dinosaur Skeleton Eats Balloons

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I read this book in the 1980s.

Book features a long necked dinosaur skeleton in a museum. A child tries to feed the dinosaur food but it keeps dropping out of his bones. He then fills the dinosaur skeleton with coloured balloons.

Please help I loved this book

313O: An Easter Egg with Another World Inside

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This is an obscure a book that has an Easter theme or at least involved rabbits who produced these really ornate Easter eggs, in which some or at least one of them had another world inside. I seem to recall something about a Grand bunny or master rabbit or similar; but there also seemed to be some kind of theme where a child escapes their current world into one of the eggs (like a pied piper kind of story)

313M: Rhinoceros Escapes from Zoo

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I read this book to my children between 1966 and 1970. The story is about a rhinoceros who escapes from a zoo and two children, a boy and a girl, find the rhinoceros in a park and see to it that he gets home.  My recollection is that the book had a brown cover.  I don’t remember it having a dust jacket, although it may have when it was new.  We must have purchased it at a local bookstore in Northridge, California.

 

313L: Two Ladybugs Make Slippers

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When I was a child, we enjoyed many books from the local library (located at Coventry Rd and Euclid Heights Boulevard in Cleveland Heights, Ohio).

A favorite was about two bugs. I remember them pictured as lady bugs named Pimpernel and Cochineal. Their friend Bagley Beetle was sick and they went to visit him and gave him some slippers they made for him.

Book was probably printed 1930’s or earlier.

313J: Girl gets carried by big bird to a fantasy land

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Girl gets lifted by a big bird to a far off fantasy land. She has golden blonde hair and brown eyes. All of the people in the new land have white hair and blue-green eyes, and the kids ride to school on six-legged unicorns.There is a wise old woman who grants each person one answer to an important question in their lifetime. This was a children’s book I borrowed from the library in 1972 or 1973.

313I: Seven Soviet Sisters

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This book was a little over my head when I was around 7 (ironically). It was not a Little Golden Book nor a Disney book!

It was a story book or what seemed to be a collection of related stories. An elementary epic?  May be Scandinavian stories rather than Soviet.

The early 1970s edition I had was bright blue and the cover was at least 8 ½ x 11.

There were seven (or only six) sisters. In the picture book version each sister was wearing an ornate but monochromatic dress. I’m thinking they were different examples of the regional dresses worn, or maybe clan-type styles. But with a hippie-vibe art style.

I think each sister was sent out on some kind of unusual coming-of-age search. Or maybe they were kidnapped by seven (or six) different people and each had a story about how they got home.

I was a natural reader, but either the words were a bit too big for me or I was too interested in what they were wearing to remember much of the plot. (That, and home wasn’t peaceful so I was sleep-deprived…so it was a big, wordy, beautiful blur of a book.)

I’d still have the book, but since I didn’t seem to be reading it, Mom gave it away to charity. I still have books that I was given when I was even younger…

 

313F & 313G: Ghosts and Time Travel

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I work at a high school library and am trying to find titles of two books I had read as a young person back in the 70s. Both were probably titles that I had ordered off of the book order form/flyer that the school handed out back in the day where the kids could order really cheap books, like maybe Scholastic or Troll or something similar.

  1. This was a ghost story. Something about a young person (a girl, I think) walking down a lane (I think “Lane” might be in the title) and seeing an old cottage type house that sometimes had an old ghost lady (or couple) living there and I think the girl would visit her/them. I don’t think other people saw the ghosts and it appeared to be an abandoned cottage to other people. The girl might not have known that the old lady/couple were ghosts until later on.
  2. This was a time travel story about young people and something to do with a big wheel. I don’t know if it was a wagon wheel of a water wheel but the wheel was important and “Wheel” may be in the title. It’s not “Wheel of Time” by Robert Jordan.

313E: Pet Alligator’s Balcony Garden

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In this children’s book, a pet alligator lives in a penthouse apartment. He wants a garden to be on his balcony. One day, he falls off of the balcony to either get at a plant or a balloon animal. (Somehow, balloon animals are involved. ) He gets stuck in a tree, and his owners frantically search for him. At the end, they buy plants to put on his balcony. Each page was full of intricate details when you examined them closely.