It wasn’t a fever dream after all
I’ve been trying to find several books for years. By that I mean that I regularly use a variety of search terms on Google and especially Google Image searches.
I recently found one of them on a book resale site by narrowing it down to the possible year of publication and the genre (the technology diary reported).
Now there are two more books that I would like to find. Like the first one, these are books that were never in my possession, but that I regularly borrowed from the library and that burned themselves into my brain. One was a craft book, but I mostly remember very complex craft projects that an adult would have had to do, so I always just looked at the book but never made any crafts from it.
So I limit myself to craft books and then search for the years 1980 to 1989 (language German, hardcover) without success, then I change the period to 1975 to 1983 and find the book “Play, Laugh, Do It Yourself” by Marie-Luise and Stefan Lemke-Pricken from 1979. On the cover you can see one of these impressive craft projects. The book is available cheaply second-hand, I think an order will be out soon.
The second book was a picture book that I was never quite sure whether it wasn’t a very stuck-in fever dream, because the story in my head was roughly that a bear climbs up to the moon with other friends and then gets frightened by something and slides back down to earth on a long slide. Searches for bear, teddy and moon always give wrong results, I also saved the book as slightly surreal and don’t know how much has changed in my head over the decades.
With the new method, genre picture book and then I search for the years 1975 to 1985 and always limit myself to one term. “Teddy” doesn’t do anything, neither do “Bear” and “Moon”. Maybe it wasn’t a bear, but something else, I’ll try “rabbit”, who knows, but that doesn’t help either. Then I have a flash of inspiration and look for “ladder”, because in my memory the animals climb up a ladder. BINGO!
There’s only one search result, “The Big Slide” by Ray and Catriona Smith from 1977, but that’s exactly what I was looking for. All I have to do is compare the pictures and I know immediately that I’m right and that my memory wasn’t a fever dream. My mistake was that the animals climbed to the moon, because that doesn’t actually happen, they just climb an incredibly long ladder, have to puke every now and then, are disturbed by planes and witches and then land on a platform from which they slide down.
Unfortunately, the book is a rarity and therefore not available very cheaply, but I suspect that I won’t wait long because I really urgently need to read the whole story again.
I can’t believe that within just a few days all of my desperate research attempts over the last few years were crowned with success. Cheers to period searches on digital used goods exchanges! What would have happened to me without her?
(Anne Schuessler)