[Sca-librarians] Re: Place For Lost Plots?

[Carowyn Silveroak]

Hello! Popping up again....

> Why don't you just tell us about the book/s and we'll see whether we 
> can identify it?
> We're a well read bunch.

*blush*  Well, since so many people asked.....

My first two are from my old high school library, and I went back to ask
about them, and was told that all of the "old books" had been gotten rid
of when the old librarian retired, and no, records weren't kept of what
was "retired" (under questioning she did admit that they were taken to
the dump).

Yeah, really helpful.

I read these 2 books between 1984-1988.

The first book was a mystery novel set on Mars, and I think was written
in the 1950's.  I don't remember much about the plot except that there
was a baseball game, and you had to use metal pellets to change the
course of your direction as you jump around in lesser gravity.  The
mystery was tied to some weird murders, which were caused by dropping
storage cubes off of buildings and crushing people by using Mars' weird
gravity.  

The second was called "The Black Opal", and was set in one of the first
women's colleges.  There's a mystery about a gentleman who stayed at the
college as a guest, and he was supposed to have the first black opal ever
mined.  He dies of pneumonia that night, and the black opal was never
found.  So this young lady adapts to college life (which is nothing like
I ever experienced, LOL!!), and puts on a play about the black opal, but
she gets laryngitis, and so they decide to make it a campy "everyone
speaks their lines by using cue cards", but they reverse the cue cards by
accident, and the audience sees the stage directions instead.  The
audience finds this hilarious, the protagonist isn't so thrilled....and
that's about all I remember.

The third I only saw about 7 years ago, and should have bought it, but I
didn't know how hard it would be to find again!  We visited the J
Pierpont Morgan Museum in NYC, to see the Book of Hours exhibit.  I'd
like to purchase a copy of that exhibit, but I have two problems: 1) The
museum is closed for renovations, so they're not taking any queries, and
2) there's an exhibit touring the country with a similar theme right now,
so any search I do picks up all that information, not the earlier
exhibit's information.  Frustrating!

Also, I saw a book in the bookstore there, on Russian Knotwork (as
opposed to Celtic knotwork).  And, of course, I got no other info on that
book, thinking it was available.  Boy, was I wrong!  And now I can't find
that one either!

Help? 

And thank you for all the info for finding these books - if asking y'all
doesn't help, that's where I'm going!

-Carowyn