Collection of spooky stories for kids from the '70s or '80s

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Collection of spooky stories for kids from the '70s or '80s

1kmcmanus77
Editado: Ene 22, 2021, 11:21 am

I'm trying to locate a collection of spooky stories I checked out endlessly in lower elementary school, in the late '80s. I don't know the name or author, but the cover art was whimsically spooky, and there were definitely witches, a cauldron, and a tree (maybe). It had a blue spine, and there may have been a second collection with an orange(ish) spine.

One of the last entries was Shakespeare's "Double Double Toil and Trouble," which I memorized, performed at second-grade show-and-tell, and used to apparently scare the pants off my teacher.

It is not Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Short and Shivery, or In a Dark, Dark Room. It was probably published in the '70s or possibly early '80s. The art is possibly like Sheilah Beckett's and/or Rankin/Bass's cartoon "The Last Unicorn."

Please help!

2Marissa_Doyle
Ene 22, 2021, 9:52 am

Any chance it was Ruth Manning Sanders' A Book of Witches? The entry here on LT isn't helpful, but if you look it up on Amazon, it gives more info.

3kmcmanus77
Ene 22, 2021, 11:20 am

>2 Marissa_Doyle: I just looked this up and thought it may be the one, but I know for sure that one of the last, if not the last, entries is "Double, Double Toil and Trouble," and that's not the case with The Book of Witches. Thank you though!

4NinaVi
Ene 23, 2021, 2:13 am

Witches, Witches, Witches edited by Helen Hoke and illustrated by W. R. Lohse?

5kmcmanus77
Ene 23, 2021, 12:12 pm

>4 NinaVi: I just did a deep dive on this, and found a couple of different covers, one of which looked familiar. However, I finally found a table of contents, and it doesn't include the three witches' chant from Macbeth as one of the last entries. Thank you for the suggestion though!

6NinaVi
Ene 23, 2021, 1:17 pm

>5 kmcmanus77: The Macbeth excerpt is, for some reason, not listed in the table of contents, but I have confirmed from a couple of different sources that it is included in the book, on page 170 I believe. Not exactly at the end, but it is in there, if that helps.

7NinaVi
Ene 23, 2021, 1:20 pm

In my search I also came across this illustration that I have not been able to find a source for as of yet:

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/108930884708228499/

Does it look familiar?

8kmcmanus77
Ene 24, 2021, 12:32 pm

>6 NinaVi: That's heartening, thank you! I'll see if I can get ahold of a copy somewhere.

9kmcmanus77
Ene 24, 2021, 12:37 pm

>7 NinaVi: The illustration with the poem was different. It was black and white, and I remember the underlined title at the top of the page. The witches themselves were different; for lack of a better example, they kind of looked like a cross between Roald Dahl's The Twits and the witch from Looney Tunes cartoons from the '60s.