Category Archives: Unsolved

352G: The Symbol in the Magical Wall

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I read this book in 2009 or 2010. I believe it was considered a young adult book but it was a good reading level for me in 6th grade. The book seems so scattered and has gotten worse in my memory over the years so excuse me if I seem to jump around in the story.

The cover I believe had a sort of symbol that is important in the book. I remember the cover being mostly red and black but couldn’t say for sure.
The main character is a boy around 12 who is in the foster system (?) and comes to live with this old woman who is introduced as talking to the TV (I believe Jeopardy) and talks to the TV as if the person on the show Is talking directly to her (indicating schizophrenia), but the TV actually changes from the show to sending her secret code within the show (?).
Somehow they end up in her house deep in the woods, the child service worker leaves and the boys weird gets weird (in like a magical seance) and he likes to walk around the woods surrounding the property and find a magical wall of some kind that the symbol then becomes important in. The story gets so back and forth from there it would be impossible to explain. This book somehow helped me a lot in the part of life I was in and I really just need to read the series again.

352F: The Nonsense Book

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The book I am looking for, a book I read at my elementary school library quite often, is a children’s book, maybe aimed at the 9-12 year old set. I suspect from the late 1960s to the mid 1970s. It was a book of self-proclaimed nonsense, with riddles and jokes and poems and shaggy dog stories, with surrealistic drawings and text. The sense of humor was counter-cultural and a bit Monty Pythonesque. I seem to recall that it had the “As I was going to St Ives” riddle in it.

It was a larger format book, 8.5”x11” or larger, and around 80 pages. I think the cover was a brownish green. The drawing style was in a similar borderline grotesque line-art mode as the illustrations for Shel Silverstein or Roald Dahl books, but with a significant amount of clip art and a throwback-y quality to it. I think the title itself had the word nonsense in it, or a word with a similar meaning.

I’ve been racking my brains trying to recall more about it, but that’s all I can seem to manage.

352D: Girl in the 40s or 50s Who Can’t Draw Wants Her Teacher to Hang Her Picture In Front of Class

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I’m looking for a chapter book I read probably in the mid to late 1980s. My guess is that it was published in that time frame. It was set in the 1940s or 1950s and was about a school-aged girl. The main plot point I remember is that every week her teacher put one of her students’ paintings on display at the front of the class. The girl wished that her picture would be chosen, but she was not much of an artist. She finally convinced her father to draw a picture of a child ice-skating for her, and she colored it with watercolors. Her teacher selected this drawing, but not because of the drawing of the ice skater. She was drawn to the girl’s use of color and the many shades of blue she used, which was how the sky really looked, rather than just one single shade.

I also remember that a ballpoint pen was a plot point in this book — the girl really wanted a ballpoint pen, which was new and cool, but I think the ink may have kept clumping up and she had to warm it up on the radiator. (Or maybe that’s what was happening with her fountain pen, and that’s why she wanted a ballpoint pen.) I also remember the name Molly, but I could be mixing it up with the American Girl doll from the same era.

352C: High School French Textbook From 60s

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I’m looking for a high school teaching French text probably published during the first half of the 60’s. I remember it as having a plain teal cover and being entirely black and white. It contained paragraphs to translate that were folk stories. The sunken city of Ys- you can still hear the bells beneath the waves- the storks of Alsace. I lost it in a flood.

352B: Children travel to other worlds with animals

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It starts with some kids (possibly siblings, there are two or three kids) in, I think, a shop, a thrift, antique, or pawn shop, with no adults around and they are visited by these creatures. One is like a bear that talks in a phonetic southern-US style accent and one is like a dragonfly whose words allruntogetherlikethis. When I say “like” a bear and dragonfly, I think they were described as similar to these but not exactly the same. I think the creatures come from the kids interacting with an object in the shop.
They visit other worlds or dimensions and at one point they’re in a desert and tiny bugs swarm them and try to get to the moisture in the kids’ eyes and mouths so they have to keep them shut tight. They have to figure out how to outwit the antagonist without opening their eyes or mouths.
That’s all I remember. It was most likely written in the 70s or maybe 80s but definitely no later than mid-nineties. I read it around 2000 and it seemed old at the time.
I’ve spent so long looking for this because I just don’t believe no one else has read this and I think about it every time a gnat flies in my face! I feel like I’m in another dimension myself!!

352A: World’s Scariest Ghost Stories for Kids

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I’ve been trying to locate this children’s ghost stories book for decades now –
I got it through a school Weekly Reader form back in the 80s and the title was something like World’s Scariest Ghost Stories Ever …or something extremely close.

The book’s cover I had had a penciled like art on the front with a huge cloud in the sky with a mean looking old mans face blowing wind down at someone walking up a path.

It has multiple sub titled stories in it all teaching a lesson of some sort by the end.

One story is about a young girl who has 3 Golden Orbs and is made to sleep overnight in a haunted castle and must keep her orb until morning…again that’s the gist of it from my memory.

Another story is about a cook in big house and there’s is a little man who lives in the kitchen in a hole in the wall and makes a deal with the cook I think I believe the title of the story was Darby O Grady?

Yet another story was about skeleton’s skull that keeps crying out in a creepy old house in a room at the top of the stairs I think for “Crust of Bread”.

It was a paperback book I got it from a school Book Weekly Reader and I believe the book was published in the 70s originally as the book did have random art pages in it and the art was old time art with a renaissance clothing stye in the art. I remember in one art page there is a giant, who is a ghost in this big mansion who was chasing the little girl or something and the picture has a Giant in front of a large open shuttered window from the inside and the giant is standing but only has from his waist down and is missing his whole top half of his torso while holding a sword. He has renaissance knee high pants and high stockings like they wore in Benjamin Franklin’s era.

Another pic was from the Cook story where they show the cook standing in the kitchen at the stove area all of the art line illustration like a feather pen or pencil type simple but classic illustration. Only a handful of art pages scattered have art on them I believe its one art page for every sub story or less.

I am dying to find this book and capture a small piece of my childhood. If you can Help me at all in any way so that I can track this book and possibly buy one I would be Eternally Grateful.

Again thank you so very much for all your time and help with this 28 year long search.

351Y: Black and White Blobs Accept Different Blob

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Looking for a book from at least my childhood (~30 years ago). It's a a thick book, mostly white cover, on what felt like recycled or hand-made paper. Story is that a world exists in black and white, the characters are kinda oblong blobs, then one day a different looking oblong blob shows up (he is either in color, or fuzzy versus not fuzzy, I can't remember). For a while he has a hard time getting people to interact with him, but eventually the lesson is that we shouldn't be mean to or scared of people who look or act differently. I thought it was something about Nog (not Nod), but cannot find anything by that name or description.

351X: Part comic/part written book series maybe called ‘Freak’?

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I’d really like some help finding a comic I haven’t read since I was in school in 2001. I’ve tried googling it with no luck. I swear it was called ‘F.R.E.A.K’ or something. The front cover had a teenager jumping in the air clutching/firing lightning from his hands. There were two issues I think, one with a blue background cover and one with a green background.

It was about some teenager who stumbles into an alternate dimension (after getting beaten up in the street by hooligans) and meets a bipedal lioness who can talk. There were other animal people, and they were at war.

The lions were mostly police, and some of the characters had psychic powers and they were referred to as ‘TK’s’. The main bad guys were a vulture woman and a fat guy with angel wings. They used guns and were rivals. The angel wings guy says in one panel that ‘I like to keep ahead of the competition’ or something similar, and it shows a severed head on a spike.

The lionnes jams a gun with her mind as the teenager is about to be shot, but Angel wing guy thinks the teen did it and that he’s a ‘TK’.

There were also lizard people and monkey people. One of the lizard people pretends to be prison guard to help rescue the teenager. It was partially comic and partially written story. I remember it being very violent and adult oriented. Please does anyone know what it is? Any help would be most appreciated