Hersey, John. The Child Buyer: A Novel in the Form of Hearings before the Standing Committee on Education, Welfare, & Public Morality of a certain State Senate, Investigating the Conspiracy of Mr. Wissey Jones, with others, to Purchase a Male Child (New York: Knopf, 1972), 257 p.

Miss Elizabeth Cloud is the Librarian at the Pequot Town Free Library. She is a hunchback with "a sufferer's face and a most intriguing forehead." (p. 112). She likes children and provides reading material for the novel's brilliant 12 year old subject. "I hold back nothing from a child's mind-- within reason. I can smell a bad smell as well as the next person, but where there's curiosity, healthy curiosity, I believe in satisfying it. If you thwart and withhold--then's when the prurience and sneaking and perversion begin." (p. 144).