Fontaine, Don. Sugar on the Slate (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, c1951) 278 p.

The Librarian of Peyton Junior High School was the short chunky Amy Beasley. Amy was never sure where she fit into the school hierarchy: she wasn't exactly faculty, yet she “possessed a college major in library science. This fact was certainly enough to raise her slightly above the position of strictly clerical help.” (p.95).

After years of painstaking effort Amy felt that the library showed signs of becoming an artistic success. Her only regret was that books came to her in such a variety of sizes and colors that she was unable to show her keen sense of harmonious arrangement. The Dewey System hampered her. She had never completely abandoned the idea of perfecting a system which would allow her to put all the small red books on one shelf, the big blue ones on another and so forth until she had taken care of all shapes and hues. She planned to call it the Beasley System. (p. 97).

Amy has a mystery to solve when she starts finding books with strips of pages torn out.