Books You've Forgotten

In about April 1990 I started keeping a list of every book I read. It's still being kept, in the same red and black hardback notebook - almost twenty years now of worsening handwriting and different coloured inks. The books I read before that I've tried to remember, but there are gaps. Mostly they were books I borrowed from Newton Aycliffe library in County Durham (pictured!). This was the place I found loads of great stuff - not all of it Terrance Dicks, Malcolm Hulke or James Blish.

On Access Weekends with my father in the late seventies we would go to the library first of all and he would supervise my choosing some non fiction - usually about dinosaurs, space or history. He didn't think I should be reading fiction because that was for girls. Luckily, those weekends finished about the time I was ten and I was free to choose what I wanted. I'd often go to the library after school and do my homework there. It was a cardboardy building with a tiny stock, but it seemed an endless array of fiction. My favourite times were when it lashed down with rain against the glass wall that faced the town precinct. The rain sounded like hooves on the flat roof.

In recent years I have remembered titles and authors' names enough to re-find certain favourites through ebay or Amazon used-and-new. David Rees' gay teen novel, 'In the Tent' and Eric Houghton's 'Steps Out of Time' are novels that became important to me, and that I borrowed several times over - and which have since found their way back to me.

However, there are still those books that remain elusive. Yesterday, the conversation about Ursula Le Guin continued on my facebook page - and there are a number of people wondering whether they actually read Earthsea at the time, or absorbed it somehow, or whether they just remember reading something else. Reading is such an inexact science and memories and details can be elusive. In the course of this Helen Shay started talking about a favourite series of fantasy adventures for children by the american writer Edward Eager... and immediately they seemed familiar to me - especially the book called The Time Garden.

I remembered the kids' book I've always wanted to get hold of again. I don't remember title or author, so I realise that the chances are slim. But I thought it was worth trying to describe it here - and to see whether anyone can help..?

I must have borrowed this book in the late seventies or early eighties. It would have dated from about then. It was about a brownstone apartment building in New York City, and the kids who lived there. The illustrations were sort of Quentin Blakish. The kids get hold of a silver pencil - and with it, they can bring to life drawings out of story books. There is a whole sequence in which Captain Hook and his pirates run amok in New York.

Does this ring any bells for anyone?

There was a also a teen sf novel... to do with a trickster character - a boy who dressed like a harlequin or a jester, in a costume sewn with mirrors. I think the people lived under a dome, with lush countryside beyond, where the jester character lived. It sounds like John Christopher, but isn't... Any ideas?