stump the bookseller
Sunday 13 May 2007 | someone left a cookie
How cool is Loganberry Books’ search feature where you pay $2, recall a treasured childhood book and see if the book clerks can find it?! I’m tempted to shell out, just to try to find a beloved picture book about a giant orange tabby who was the captain’s cat on a ship. The book was printed in these crazy tangerine and turquoise offset colors on line drawings, and all I remember was that the tabby had enormous feet (Maine coon cat?) and loved to eat the fish scraps. Anyone else have books like this, that have lingered in your mind for years without your being able to remember author or title?
(PS—be sure to read oleoptene’s thoughtful comment on same…and in answer to her suggestion: I can’t tell from google/wiki if that was the book or not, but the public library has a copy so I’ll check it out tomorrow! The ship on the cover definitely looks familiar; but I don’t remember things being quite that plotty, just a big book about a captain and his cat, and nothing in particular happening. I only wish I could reciprocate in re: your own missing pair.)
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It wasn’t Evaline Ness’s _Sam, Bangs & Moonshine_, was it? Just going on your description of the illustrations. A friend asked what children’s books were essential in a library and I spent the weekend searching and trying to recall things from my own childhood. Tthere are three that have bothered me over the years: one involved some animal characters who in one chapter roll down a hill in a barrel with a shaken up bottle of root beer stuck out a knot hole as the exhaust of their ‘rocket.’ The second, more vague, had a girl visiting the moon on a hot air balloon. Third was a science fiction series featuring these small bear-like beings discovered on a planet. Last night it finally struck me that these were proto-ewoks, and by looking at the wikipedia ewok entry I found a citation for H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy — and was thus very excited and have amazoned it straight away so I can keep cultivating my own little science fiction geeks.
I find it strange that so many of my memories of childhood books are so much more sensual than other childhood memories, the glossiness and thickness of paper and richness of colors, the smell of the books, and I fear that in obsessing over childhood books it’s that intensity I’m really questing for. On the other hand, there is some reassurance that this feeling that the secrets to a really good life are to be found in books is as old as my oldest conscious memories.