The Lost and Found Books Office
Dec. 5th, 2008 08:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustAlmost exactly a year ago, I posted about the books I had as a child and had not seen since. Some of them I have since recovered, and I've updated that post to say so. But one book - or maybe two books - remained mysterious:
A couple of days ago, I had an e-mail from Kapil Thadani, identifying those books for me. They matched the description on TomFolio of two books by Ursula Horsley-Smith (White Horses and [The] Door That Wasn't There, the first two of a series of four, published in the 1950s). Which sounds right: the dates and titles fit, and the name is certainly familiar. Inevitably, the books are hard to find - unless some publisher is prepared to do for them what Fidra Books have been doing for some other neglected treasures...
Anyway, Kapil is also trying to identify a book or series of books, bought in Bombay in the 1980s:
Does anyone recognise this? Are we talking about the same books, or is this another variation on some similar themes?
Something about white horses (in the sense of sea foam, but which turned into actual horses) and a green door in the wall, through which you go to Somewhere Else...
A couple of days ago, I had an e-mail from Kapil Thadani, identifying those books for me. They matched the description on TomFolio of two books by Ursula Horsley-Smith (White Horses and [The] Door That Wasn't There, the first two of a series of four, published in the 1950s). Which sounds right: the dates and titles fit, and the name is certainly familiar. Inevitably, the books are hard to find - unless some publisher is prepared to do for them what Fidra Books have been doing for some other neglected treasures...
Anyway, Kapil is also trying to identify a book or series of books, bought in Bombay in the 1980s:
Like you, I think it was a series of books, and the white horses were a recurring motif on the inside of the hardcover. I think they may have carried the protagonist away somewhere in the story. The other elements that i can recall are fairly standard fantasy tropes - a castle on some sort of cliff, an important journey for the protagonist, a bit in a forest. Another image that sticks out strongly in my head is this room (wooden walls and floor) with an open far wall that looks right into a forest. I can't be certain but I think the protagonist was being chased and was forced to jump out of the house into the forest from that wall.
Does anyone recognise this? Are we talking about the same books, or is this another variation on some similar themes?
