Book Stumpers--How to Find a Book When You've Forgotten the Title and Author

Today, something I've been waiting for since before Christmas has finally arrived!  Actually, the truth is, this is something I've been waiting for for 45 years!

Many years ago I read a book from the library that completely captivated me.  I didn't remember the author or the title, but the story has stayed with me all these years.  When I began buying used books for our children back in the 1980's, I used to keep an eye out just in case I should run across this book again.  Whenever I visited a used book store where the proprietor seemed to care about old books, I would ask if the plot was familiar to them.  And when we got the internet, I tried searching for "my" book that way. 

All was in vain.  No one had ever heard of a book about a group of children who found a secret cave full of works of art behind a waterfall where the art treasures had been hidden to keep them from the Germans.  I began to wonder if I had dreamed the story!

Then a few days before Christmas, as we sat around the living room, I borrowed Kara's computer to play around with a new search for my book.  Search engines have evolved a lot over the years, and when I googled "search for used children's books by plot," one of the websites that popped up was Loganberry Books' "Stump the Bookseller."  http://www.loganberrybooks.com/stump.html 
Rather than spend $2 to post my own stumper, I began reading through the ones already posted to see if anyone else might be looking for the same book.  Sure enough, I found one whose plot sounded quite similar even though it was obviously not the same book.  A helpful reader had posted a suggestion that the desired book sounded like one by Enid Blyton.

So I googled Enid Blyton and found a website with detailed synopses of all her books.
http://www.enidblytonsociety.co.uk/
http://www.enidblytonsociety.co.uk/book-details.php?id=166&title=The+Valley+of+Adventure
And there it was in the Adventure series, The Valley of Adventure!  It was MY book!  I had found it!  Forty-five years of hoping that one day I might somehow find my book--and there it was on the computer screen in front of me!

Of course I headed straight to amazon.com to order it.  On Christmas Eve I received an email that my book had been shipped and would arrive between Dec. 24 and Jan. 19.  Huh?!  I was sure it couldn't take that long since other books I ordered from Amazon arrived in a matter of days.  But day after day passed, and my book didn't come.  Finally, I decided it must have gotten lost.  Actually, ordering off the internet, I hadn't checked the address of the shipper--the U.K!  It's a good thing they gave themselves such a wide delivery spread since they needed almost 4 weeks to get it here!  Isn't it strange, how after looking for my book for 45 years, this one last month seemed to take forever?


But here it is . . . at long last . . . in my hot little hands, and I can't wait to read it . . . again.