Oo, MIT has a nest of maybe red-tailed hawks, and the clearest web-cam I have ever seen trained on it. Right now a parent is standing over the two? chicks, watching and guarding and also preening its extremely fluffy belly. I am a bird sicko, wanting to cuddle with a raptor. I know this.
I recently submitted three queries to Loganberry Books. All of them were solved within a month, which makes me think I wasn't reading obscure enough books as a child.
I can't find my query for what turned out to be Adam's Key, a beginning chapter book by someone Lattimore. All I wanted was the title, so I can rest easy there. I could give a range for this author's surname because of where I know it was shelved, the farther alcove. I could have narrowed the range if I could remember when the new cases were added, tall narrow four- or five-shelved cases constructed to either side of the children's room exterior door, which lay between the two alcoves. Those cases pulled Ls through Os closer to the nearer alcove and Narnia and Mrs. Frisby were now in the main room instead of hiding in the further, my favorite, alcove. The early alphabet never moved, so when I wondered about The Ghosts, I knew the author began with B (Nina Barber) because of where the book was.
Another query was "A girl is part of a behavioralist school environment. Adults are absent? as if the children were babies left in a Skinner box. They submit homework into mailslots and it is returned marked in brown marker (not red). Everything is regulated and hands-off, their laundry and cooking and sleeping. The title is something like The [Secret] [Project/Experiment] with maybe an alphanumeric. The ending smacked of the author’s not knowing how else to wrap it up: the girl (and others?) escapes, she runs home and tells her parents, they are mad because “that’s what you’ve been doing after school/late to supper for so long,” whereas the girl remembers being held away from her family for some considerable time. It was probably from the ‘80s, though it could be the ‘70s. I remember the cover was brown (or dark) with an a piece of notepaper on it, jagged on the top edge from being torn out of a spiral notebook."
This turned out to be Bernice Grohskopf, Notes on the Hauter experiment : a journey through the inner world of Evelyn B. Chestnut, which I might not have found in PGN at all since I don't remember where it was. Or, if I did, it unsurprisingly it turned out to be G--F through K and maybe early L, like Lattimore for Adam's Key, were in that further alcove.
"A teenage girl is a medic on an alien planet, descendants of a long-ago, forgotten Earth colony. A ship lands, perhaps accidentally or because of malfunction, with people from Earth, who are surprised at the divide between these people and themselves. The colonists are taller than terrestrials and cannot reproduce as well, whereas the terrestrials are flip about children and shocked at the colonists' lack of technology (the colonists use splints instead of automatic bone-healers, and they don't have orthodontia). The colonists might keep a kind of large, intelligent blue insect as pets. I remember the cover being mostly white, with the girl in brown in the foreground and muted, watercolory figures behind her."
This turned out to be H.M. Hoover's Another Heaven, Another Earth. I was wrong about Madam Pomfrey's Bone Re-Grow, which doesn't figure in it. From what other book do I remember someone's horror at the idea of a splint or a cast instead of an immediate healing? Also I was wrong about the cover. The girl was in brown in the foreground but the figures behind her are in bright, though still watercolory, hues. The pet was an intelligent reptile that ate the large bugs.
I couldn't give an author range for this one because PGN's YA section was so small, A to Z in ten feet on two shelves, an afterthought under a counter in the reference section, that I have no spatial recall about those books at all.
I do miss PGN, a foolish nostalgia since its physical structure is so changed and none of the staff I remember remain. At least the reading room remains largely untouched, with Phoebe gazing benevolently out from her portrait over the fireplace.