Category Archives: Unsolved

303J: All For Nothing?

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They had this picture book at my preschool in the mid-’80s, though it may have been published earlier. It was about a boy who got into all sorts of trouble “for nothing,” as he described it. Escapades included putting water in the gas tank of the car and chopping down the family Christmas tree (“Sometimes they even spank me for nothing!”). The story ended with something like, “Oh well…in the end I guess it’s all ok.” The illustrations were large, simple, and goofy, almost like kids’ drawings; I remember the characters had big mitt-like hands and line-drawn smiles and frowns.

303I: Eye of the Needle

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I am looking for a childrens/YA book I would have read in the early 1980s (probably not written before 1950) in which there was a rock formation known as the Needle, because it was needle-shaped, with a hollow at the top, in which was a haystack – so at some point the hero or heroine was looking for something in a haystack in the Needle.  That is the one detail I remember.

303H: Frogs in a bike race in France?

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This was a children’s book/ picture book I remember from my first grade teacher’s classroom in 1979. There was either a bike race happening, like the Tour de France, or the characters were using bikes in pursuit of or running away from something, and one of the characters was a tall and kind of lanky frog (wearing a beret or newsboy cap). He was dressed kind of like a Provencal country gentleman. He ended up going through underground tunnels (or sewers) either to escape or catch up. I remember artwork showing the frog climbing out through a manhole. This has bugged me for years and no one seems to have any idea of what I’m talking about.

303F: 1970’s cement stream

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I’m looking for a book from 1970-74ish. I think it was in a city; there was a neighbor that the kids started to hang out with. It may have had a nature/environmental feel/message. They worked together to dig a stream bed in the guy’s front yard, which they lined with concrete and then painted rainbow colors. I remember my imagination soaring with this book!

Thank you!

 

303E: NYC resident replaces priceless art at museums with forgeries; no one notices

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I read this book as a young adult in the early 1980s, so it must be older than that. The book is NOT From The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.

As I recall it, there is a character who lives a modest life in New York City. The character is a passionate painter. He/she meticulously recreates great masterpieces, then from time to time sneaks into the Metropolitan Museum of Art (or possibly some other museum) and replaces an original with a forgery. Over the years, he/she has done this a dozen times, but no one ever discovers that the paintings are forgeries. The originals then sit in his/her modest apartment. The forger makes no money off his/her expert forging talents. A few of the forger’s friends know he/she does this, but there is never any sense that the forger will get caught.

This character may not be the main character of the book. I seem to remember that the book had an ensemble of unusual characters.

It is possible that the forger character, or another character, lived in Central Park.

 

This is probably a young adult book.

 

Thanks!

303B: The dead man’s childhood mementos

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I am 66 years old, but when I was in elementary school in Mountain View, CA, I read a short story in some reading textbook (probably from the 1950s) that I have thought about ever since. It was a “Western”. I do not remember the story’s title, but there was an illustration showing a rough-looking man in black who was an outlaw and who was being hunted by a sheriff (I think for murder).

The outlaw made it to a place where he had buried what the reader was led to believe was a treasure box. When he was killed, and the authorities opened the box, it was filled with the dead man’s little childhood mementos.

There was an illustration of the open box as well.

It had a profound effect on me, and I would love to be able to read it again.

 

302Z: A flower pot for a hat?

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Vintage children’s picture book about mixed up (hillbilly?) family that drives a crazy car, lives in a goofy house, wears funny clothing (a flower pot for a hat?), and paints their farm animals (pig? goat? cow? chicken?) funny colors. The son’s name is something like Oscar Idis Nooney and the other family members (father, mother, daughter) have similar names. It has to be vintage 40s or early 50s. No idea about the title but it was a favorite of my father’s. He was born in 1941.

 

302Y: Strange “activity” book

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I’ve posted about this elsewhere, but there’s a strange book from my childhood that both my sister and I remember.  I say activity book, but it wasn’t really an activity book. There was no place to draw or anything in the book. Here are some details:

*It was probably published around 1980-1985, I would have read it from 1987-1991, and I believe it was my sister’s before I got it. It was about a 2nd to 5th grade reading level. Some pics, some text.

*The cover was a dark blue/teal, the title was a garish reddish color, and there was a knight on it

*I remember the title being kind of long, and ending with the words “…for kids!”

*The book was really non-sequitur, and went all over the place. One page might be a math puzzle, the next might be a story about baseball.

*There was a recurring theme of a medieval knight throughout the whole thing, and he would just pop up randomly to comment on stuff

*There were a lot of jokes about “the author/publisher of this book blah blah blah” and “the editors of this book blah blah blah.” Probably way over my head at the time.

*The last page was a memorization game

*I believe there was one page with a large blue square on it, and a paragraph talking about the significance of that square.

*There was at least one math word problem, and I believe it involved crickets or grasshoppers

*There was a story about baseball, maybe about the history of baseball?

*There was a brief page about lead in pencils, and how it’s called lead, but it’s really graphite

 

As for the style of the book, it’s almost as if a bunch of people with a similar sense of humor got together and decided to make a kids book, but not talk to each other about it. It was that bizarre. Almost every page was a different subject, and the only recurring motif at all was the random knight. The book constantly broke the fourth wall, and the writer(s) would make fun of the characters on that page, or the random knight would make fun of the author(s). Someone stated that it sounds like Monty Python, and it was a lot in that same vein of humor. If Monty Python made a kids book, it would be very similar to the one I’m looking for.

It’s entirely possible that it was written by a group of people, and possibly as a joke.

For what it’s worth, my grandmother lived in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area of North Carolina during my youth (the 1980’s). She had moved there from northern New Jersey in the late 1970s. She was a kindergarten teacher for most of her life.  Furthermore, her sister (my great-aunt) had actually published a few books (one of them a children’s book) during the 1960s, and lived in Washington DC until the mid 1980s. So there were strong ties in those places. The book could have been published by a small publisher in any of those places, and somehow made it’s way to my grandmother.

Again, thanks for your help!

302X: A crazy quilt in various shades of red

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Looking for a YA novel written in the 60’s or early (I read it in the mid-70’s) but it was set in the early 20th century in a rural area. A group of girls need to make a crazy quilt in various shades of red—I can’t remember why—so they had to beg, borrow and steal fabric to make it. One of the girls goes to the general store with her father who is color blind and convinces him to buy a bolt of a particularly lurid shade of scarlet for a dress for her mother who was far from pleased when she received it.

302W: Squirrels in Trees

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Somewhere between 1953-1956, on my evening trips with my father to the Rochester (NY) Public Library on Winton Road near University Avenue, in my wanderings among the children’s stacks, I found at my eye level a book about 7”x 5”, about 1/2” thick,  that had a brown cover with an illustration of squirrels. It was about squirrels and other animals in the forest. But squirrels were the stars.

Each page had maybe two short paragraph’s worth of words – maybe three sentences each.  Each page had illustrations too.  It was the first book that looked to me like a “real” book, not a children’s read-to-by-an-adult book.  It was a book I could read, meant to be read by me in solitude.

I read it over and over. I just remember the squirrels, the brownish-orange of the cover, the lovely large print, but not so large that there weren’t paragraphs. The squirrels were very happy  in their forest lives; I was so happy in my reading life.

Not much to go on, that’s for sure. I just paid my four dollars, though. Why not try?