posters – Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories

Boxcar Children

#51 The Mystery on the Train by Gertrude Chandler Warner, 1996.

The Alden Children’s Aunt Jane is planning to travel to San Francisco to join her husband, who is there on a business trip. Because the Boxcar Children have never actually traveled on a train trip before, she invites them to come with her. The trip will take three days by train. Then, they’ll spend a few days in San Francisco before flying hone. The Aldens love traveling, and they’re excited by the idea of a train trip!

When they arrive to catch the train, they witness an odd scene at the station. An older woman is fighting with a younger woman over what looks an art portfolio. The younger woman eventually gets hold of the portfolio, knocking the older woman to the ground, and runs for the train. The Aldens ask the older woman if she’s all right, and she says she is. They also ask her if the younger woman is the owner of the portfolio, and the older woman says yes. She doesn’t explain why they were fighting over it, but they later see her talking to the train porter and giving him some money. The Aldens wonder what that scene was all about.

On the train, they meet the young woman, whose name is Annie. She explains that she’s also heading to San Francisco because she wants to attend art school there. She tells them that she’s planning to stay with an uncle there and that her portfolio contains her art work. Annie and Violet enjoy talking about art together, but the Aldens have the feeling that there are things that Annie isn’t telling them. She seems very paranoid about her portfolio, always afraid to leave it unattended and panicking every time the porter tries to help her with it.

When the portfolio suddenly disappears, Annie admits to them that it doesn’t really contain her artwork. It actually has a set of vintage autographed movie posters that are valuable for collectors. They were part of an inheritance that she and her aunt shared, and she’s hoping that they will help fund her art school education. Who could have taken the portfolio on the train? Was it the man who actually told them that he collects old movie posters and that he’s hoping to purchase some in California, or maybe the mysterious man who wears sunglasses everywhere on the train? Could Annie’s aunt have paid the porter to retrieve the posters from Annie?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

Mysteries set on a train are always fun because, like with mysteries set in isolated houses, there is a limited set of possible suspects, and they’re in a situation where people cannot easily enter or leave. We know that the portfolio is still on the train, somewhere, and the thief hasn’t left. It’s just a question of who the thief is and where the thief hid the portfolio.

There are some obvious suspects in this story, but there are a couple of points that make the mystery more complicated. One is that there are unknown relationships between different suspects, some which are easier to guess or figure out than others. Another point is that Annie is keeping secrets from the Aldens. Through the story, she isn’t entirely honest with them about what’s actually going on. There are also some things that Annie doesn’t fully understand. This is one of those stories where the stolen object is stolen more than once, changing hands before they fully grasp what happened to it the first time it disappears.

There are twists to this mystery that keep it interesting, and I love the train setting! The trains they ride on through their trip are real trains, and the experience of the trip is what the actual experience is like. They take two trains, changing in Chicago to the California Zephyr, which is a real Amtrak train that goes from Chicago to San Francisco. I’ve been on train trips before, and if you’re curious, there are YouTube videos people have made, showing their own train trips across the US, like this one showing a trip on the California Zephyr.

The Lettering Book by Noelene Morris, 1984.

I remember buying this book at a Scholastic book fair back in the early 1990s, and for a while afterward, I went through a phase where I kept trying to invent different types of decorative writing. I kept them in a notebook, and most look a bit silly, like the one where the letters were made of ice cream cones and the one where the letters were weird sheep with little feet, but I had fun!

The book is about types of lettering, but it’s really much more than that. The main focus is on designing a poster. The first part of the book goes into detail about planning your poster to convey your message to other people. It recommends making an outline of your information before beginning the project and deciding what visual elements you need to include, like diagrams and pictures. There are some useful tips about research and writing, if the presentation is part of a research project.

Then the book provides examples of how to design a page, showing different possible layouts for organizing page headings, text, and images. Although this book was planned around the idea of a printed poster, I think the layout suggestions and concepts could also be used for electronic media, such as web design or PowerPoint presentations.

There are also examples for the shapes of headings and pictures and the positioning of image captions.

The book recommends using decorative markers, borders, and horizontal rules to add visual interest to the information, separate sections of a page, and make projects look more finished.

When it comes to making the lettering of the poster or page, it explains the elements that define a print style – height and width of letters, slope, line variations, pattern, color, 3D effect, and separation and spacing of letters or overlapping of letters.

A large part of the book shows examples of letters of the alphabet and numerals in different fonts. Some of them are recognizable as fonts that still used in word processing software and on the Internet.

There are also pages with examples, showing how certain styles of lettering can convey a mood or idea in headings and sample phrases.

The front and back flaps of the book fold out, and there is a chart of the parts of a page, a couple of grids like those used for planning lettering styles, and a glossary of terms used in the book.

I couldn’t find this particular book online, but a couple of related books by the same author are available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. I think I also used to own The Lettering Book of Alphabets, probably purchased at the same time as this book, and that inspired my alphabet lettering phase. The Lettering Book Companion is a companion book to The Lettering Book, and it particularly focuses on decorative borders.