Category Archives: Unsolved

295D: Enchanted Book

Beautiful cover with a picture of an opening through a Forrest. The colours were browns and golds and green. It was a story about a boy and girl traveling into an enchanted place and the things they experienced there, an adventure.  I read this book over 50 years ago

295B: Aliens coming to earth and taking people’s pets

What is the name of the book about aliens coming to earth and taking people’s pets so that there were many postings of lost dog signs? Other very strange things, electrical, are happening which causes the main character to search for their source. This same author wrote a story about a man who left his family and went to work in the city as a blind man selling pencils on the street corner.

295A: Plants feeling pain

Looking for paperback science fiction collection of short stories (probably from about 1958-65) with a story about plants and trees being able to cry out (at a pitch not audible to humans) when they feel pain. A scientist, who devises a way to convert the sounds to those audible to humans, goes mad when he is able to “hear” the effects of mowing a lawn.

294Z: It’s not Paddington

Children picture book about a bear, illustrated with photos of stuff bear in activities-short tale- seems he traveled- I remember suitcase – I knew it in 50’s might be older-I would check from OakCliff – Dallas library – know just where it is but library is gone – prob 10 x 13 size few pages.

It’s not a Paddington bear – I’m familiar with him and in this one the illustrations are photographs of the stuffed bear in the activities.

294V: A locomotive in my living room

A children’s book my parents read to me in the 1950s, about a family and a model train that somehow gets out of hand.  At one point the mother comes into the room and demands:

“To whom am I to be grateful, to whom,

For a locomotive in my living room?”

I have no idea whether or not the rest of the book rhymed, or what its title was, but that couplet has been in my head for approximately 60 years.

294U: An orthodox home in South Africa

I read this book in South Africa as a setwork book in the 70s . I’m sure it was in Afrikaans about a young girl growing up in a very orthodox home, never saw a picture of herself until late teens. She falls pregnant to either a young traveling salesman or her father, I cant remember the fine details but she somehow gets away, with the young man I think.

294T: The Six

This book I read in 1984 and was a collection of six stories of a British youth gang; each story focused on a different member of the gang. One character may have been called Darkie Bates. One of the six stories took place in a disco where the gang member was ‘saved’ by the friend of a girl he had earlier been insulting with terms like “frog-eyes”, when she hit his assailant with a bottle. He ended up going out with her. The author may have been Tony someone but just as likely not. Great book for young adult fiction.