Cover: little girl reading in a room with rolled carpets

[pams]

Hello, I am looking for the name of the book that I remember the cover is a little girl, with kerchief on head, in a room with carpets rolled up - she is seemingly Spring cleaning but has gotten waylaid by this interesting book which she is reading...which is the cover of THE SAME BOOK -- a receding image of a little girl reading amongst a lot of rolled up carpets and on the book cover is little girl reading..... I really thought the title was "Any Time Tales" but those seem to be very modern titles. This belonged to my sisters so was printed perhaps Mid-1940's to early 50's. I had it as a child - knew about it from c. 1956 until I had to leave it behind when we moved - 1963. Any help would really be most appreciated.
Pam

[Fiona1986]

A search in the cave shows "Any time tales" was published in 1922, though the cover doesn't match you description and neither does the name of either of the pieces Blyton contributed to the book.

Was the book a compilation of short stories? Or one long story?

[MJE]

     I don't know the answer to this; but in the Cave, many of the books do seem to show dozens of covers of various editions, and may well even cover all or most of the editions which appeared. So if you had the patience (and I think you would need a lot - and a lot of time), you could just go through all those and see if you can find the cover.
     I'm not sure I've ever seen that on a Blyton cover: a book cover appearing on the the cover, and it's the same book - and I suppose, if you look at that book in the cover picture, you can see a smaller book, and a smaller book within that, and so on for ever - although I imagine it would go for only three layers or so before disappearing into invisibility. Sort of like a fractal design, a Mandelbrot set or Julia set, where you can magnify it and see miniature versions of the same pattern, and yet more within that.
     It literally goes down for ever. And the odd thing is: all those Mandelbrot sets - an *uncountable* infinity of them - are actually not quite the same: every one of them is a bit different from any of the others. It's truly weird stuff beneath the surface - and all deriving from a simple equation reiterated, albeit it one using complex numbers, not just ordinary real numbers.

Regards, Michael.