As he and Joe try to get to the eight-grade basketball game in time, Wishbone the dog imagines himself as Robinson Crusoe, the sole survivor of a shipwreck who lived on a deserted islandfor nearly thirty years.

"During a fast-paced roller hockey game, Wishbone sees an awkward boy named Nathaniel try to compete, only to be humiliated by the other players. The incident reminds Wishbone of the tale about the famous hunchback of Notre Dame cathedral. Imagining himself as the deformed bell ringer, Quasimodo, Wishbone gets involved in a life-and-death struggle with his evil master, Frollo. With danger at every turn, only a true hero with a nose for adventure...

As the brave knight Ivanhoe, Wishbone must hide his true identity as he battles difficult odds to defeat an evil nobleman and reclaim his birthright.

When he and his friends try to stop Oakdale's real estate developer from destroying part of the local park, Wishbone is reminded of the conflict between nature and civilization as he imagines himself as Hawkeye, the scout from James Fenimore Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans."

When Joe and David decide to use a computer to publish a sports newsletter that will outshine the one that the school produces, Wishbone is reminded of Mark Twain's story and imagines himself as Hank Morgan, a nineteenth-century American who travels back in time to King Arthur's court.

Wishbone imagines that he is David Balfour, the young Scottish Lowlander bound for adventure in Kidnapped, the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson.

When Joe's team is in the running for the basketball playoffs, Wishbone is reminded not to judge people by size as he imagines himself as the seventeenth-century traveler, Lemuel Gulliver, whose adventures included visits to Lilliput, where people are six inches tall, and Brobdingnag, a land peopled by giants.

While helping Joe protect a top-secret note, Wishbone remembers the brilliant French detective, C. Auguste Dupin, who lived in Paris in the nineteenth century and solved crimes using psychological reasoning.

Wishbone imagines himself to be a wealthy Frenchman who must flee his homeland when war breaks out during the French Revolution.

After several burglary attempts occur at the bookstore where he is working for the summer, Joe and Wishbone decide to investigate and discover that some of the most important clues to the mystery are in the books themselves.