Scholastic Fest: #21, Lucy and the Merman

• Title: Lucy and the Merman
• Author: Audrey Brixner
• Illustrator: Joan Berg Victor
• Publisher: Scholastic Book Services
• Year: 1977
• Excerpt:

  "All the mer-people seemed to want to come up and speak to Lucy. It was nice to feel so important. One little merman who was about the same size she was kept swimming around waiting for a chance to speak to her. He had a tan body and a blue tip to his tail. He and Lucy were the only ones with the tips of their tails a different color from the rest of the their tails."
  

• Notes: Mermaids remain very popular in literature. A Book of Mermaids has long been one of Ruth Manning-Sanders' most-expensive used books. And while most Scholastic Book Services paperbacks from the 1970s cost less than a dollar used, Lucy and the Merman, as of this writing, goes for a minimum of $6 on Amazon. One reviewer there wrote: "This was a book that I read over and over again, and it never got old! Loved it!" ... I cannot find much online about author Brixner. It's not immediately clear if she had any other books published during her career. There is an Audrey C. Brixner who lived from 1915 until 1996 and might be the same woman as the author of this book; she would have been in her early 60s when this book was published, so perhaps it represented the culmination of some lifelong dream for her. ... Meanwhile, there is a blog for artist Joan Berg Victor, a Chicago native who has a Master of Fine Arts from Yale. ... The book is dedicated to Jane Amber Copilow. ... The final seven pages of the book feature a poem by Matthew Arnold titled "The Forsaken Merman," which you can read here.

From the back cover...