What I remember: an elf/dwarf? sets out on a quest. He pulls a sword out of a muddy swamp,there is a monster. There is a boy/prince? who can turn into a black or white swan. At the end, there is a huge sea wall with ice/nets? Boy saves the day, ship able to pull into harbor, people cheer, flags fly.
Category Archives: Unsolved
195B: Forgotten Book: Boy ducks wings
I’m looking for a children’s story about a boy who leaves home or is lost and is adopted by a family of ducks (or geese?). He wants to learn to fly, like the ducks do, but has no wings, so he builds wings from mud, sticks and leaves. The illustrations are in a sepia tone. My wife read this book as a girl. She is 33 years old. She doesn’t think there were words – only pictures.
195A: UK Child’s picture book
7/8 year old or younger, 1953-60s, colour drawings, long in horizontal format, children go on a journey through countryside, towns factories etc
194H: children’s book about a girl that loved to read
I’m trying to find a children’s book about a girl that loved to read. She surrounded herself with books and read all of her life, sometimes pushing away friends and family so she could read. The illustrations show her in rooms filled with books. I distinctly recall a picture of her in a big, comfortable chair and all you can see is her holding a book and surrounding by mountains of books. Maybe even by candlelight. I can’t even remember her name! All I remember are each piece of artwork in the book shows her reading and in places filled to the brim with loads and loads of books.
194E: adventures of the toy soldiers that Emily, Charlotte, and Bramwell Bronte
In 1968 when I was teaching 4th grade in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a read a book to my students that I think had been recently published and they loved it. I do not remember the title. It was a book about the adventures of the toy soldiers that Emily, Charlotte, and Bramwell Bronte had and wrote about in the imaginary country of Angria. The author took their stories and compiled them into a larger book. I thought maybe the author’s last name was Clark but I cannot find any thing under that name. Finding good books for good students aged 10-12, particularly boys, at that time was difficult and this book they loved.
Thank you for any help you can give me.
194D: Mouse Searching For House
I’m searching for this book for a friend so I don’t have much of a description. Here’s what she remembers;
The character is a mouse that is looking for a house. The circle house blows away in a storm. There’s something unsatisfactory about the corners in the triangle house.
That’s it. I hope it’s enough!
194B: A walk in New York City
In the late 1980’s t had a lovely book about a middle-aged woman who lived in an apartment with a cat. She gathers up her coat and shopping bag and purse and goes for a walk throughout the city including a stop at the Guggenheim Museum. There was no text, only the loveliest muted color drawings. I’d love to be able to share this book with my grandchildren.
194A: Boy falls into magical world, solves puzzles to escape
My younger brother ordered this book through the Scholastic Book Club or similar program in the late ’90s. He would have been between kindergarten and 2nd grade. The book followed a young boy who, I think, was visiting his uncle or grandfather and fell through, I think, a grandfather clock into another world. The reader had to solve puzzles to help him escape. The puzzles were answered on the next page and you weren’t supposed to turn the page until you solved the puzzle. They would be something like, if 12 o’clock is green and 6 o’clock is red, what color is 3? Some of the puzzles were quite hard and took us a while to solve. What I remember the most is the illustrations. They were vivid, almost life-like. They were dark and the world the boy had fallen into was frightening but the scenery was detailed and stunning, even to me as a young child.
193D: Young adult book with boy hero chasing spies
Kids fiction. I probably read it in the late 1970s. A boy is worried that he’s discovered a spy or crime situation. One memorable scene: he and his grandmother (I believe he lived with her) are talking about it and he’s afraid their room is bugged so he makes them sit under a blanket to talk. There were simple line drawing illustrations which didn’t concern themselves much with actual human proportions.
193C: Littlest Hippo
The book I am looking for was a children’s book from the 1960′s. I don’t know who the author was. I blieve it was called “The Littlest Hippo” the story was about a herd of hippos whom lived together and the smallest hippo either became separated, or was they might have all been looking for something that they couldn’t find. the little hippo looked behind things, under things around things, etc. it wasn’ until he figured out to look “UP” that he found what he was looking for (which may have been the rest of the herd of hippos).