Boy hears radio stations in his fillings -- title???

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Boy hears radio stations in his fillings -- title???

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1kbreach
feb 7, 2014, 12:27 pm

I need help remembering the title of one of my favorite kids books from the early 1970s about a boy who plays baseball and pulled in radio stations through his dental fillings . Thanks on advance for any help!

2kbreach
feb 7, 2014, 12:28 pm

I need help remembering the title of one of my favorite kids books from the early 1970s about a boy who plays baseball and pulled in radio stations through his dental fillings . Thanks on advance for any help!

3Keeline
Bewerkt: feb 7, 2014, 1:34 pm

I don't know of a juvenile book with this theme though it seems possible. From both the timing and the theme I am inclined to think about Danny Dunn (a boy inventor) and Encyclopedia Brown (a detective).

This alleged circumstance has come up a few times in 20th Century history and even Lucille Ball claimed to have been temporarily affected by it.

It also showed up on some television shows, including an episode of Gilligan's Island when the regular radio is out of commission and everyone on the island wants to hear something different. However a storm is approaching and they need to hear the weather updates. Eventually he gets hit in the jaw again and is no longer a human radio.

Here on LT there is a group devoted to this sort of activity: name that book. That is a great place to ask.

Since the inquiry is for a children's book, another online place to ask (or search first) is Loganberry Books and their Stump the Bookseller section.

In my days as a full-time antiquarian bookseller managing a large store that specialized in old children's books, we played this game often with our clients. More often than not we were able to identify a book or come up with a few candidates. Some of this involved keyword searches from titles once one of our key reference volumes was available on a CD-ROM (now unavailable, however). Key filtering questions for any inquiry like this include:

* Was the book owned or borrowed from the library?
* In what decade was the book seen?
* Was the book a picturebook or a novel?
* How large was the book?

Less often helpful but more likely remembered was the color of the cover. The databases and resources available to us in the 1990s did not include book color. However, if it was a book we had at the time or in the past, color can be a clue. When someone said that a book was "red" we had a joke that it was a good thing since books that are not "read" are not remembered.

Of course, once one struggles and finds the answer, it sticks with you. Plus, good books tend to be remembered by many people so the effort is not wasted. After you solve it once, there's a very good chance that someone else will ask for the same book, often in a similar way, and you can seem like more of a wizard the second or third time around.

James

4kbreach
feb 8, 2014, 12:12 am

Thanks so much. I posted at name that book and got the correct title in less than an hour . This is my new favorite website! Title: Elbert the Mind Reader. I have a copy on the way to me via inter library loan. Wow!