Once upon a time (in California, so it was many years ago) I bought 3 books all at the same time about knitting lace. One was Traditional Knitted Lace Shawls by Martha Waterman, one was The Lacy Knitting of Mary Schiffmann by Nancy Nehring, and one was Shetland Lace by Gladys Amedro. I can tell you this now, but for some years, I couldn't. I didn't remember.
In 2000, we moved from CA to OR. I bought these books about a month before we moved and started knitting one of the shawls. These shawls are not charted, just written out, and Ms Amedro used her own notation so it took learning that notation to get started. You start with the border and knit repeat after repeat until it is long enough. I had 82 of 84 repeats finished. The knitting bag was in the car. The car was broken into the week before we left CA and the bag (including contents) was stolen, apparently to carry along the other stuff taken from the car. I'm sure having a radio stuffed in on top of the knitting did it no good.
I was extremely bummed out losing my knitting with that many repeats done. I was also extremely busy trying to get the house ready to sell and the stuff packed up to move to OR and my children were 7 and 5 at the time, still needing a great deal of attention at this stressful period of time. I did not run right out to replace the book.
I moved to OR, got settled into the new house, got a new job, all that lovely stuff. I started unpacking books. I could only find one of the books (the Waterman). Which book was the book I lost? (And why couldn't I find the other book, or a few other books of a similar nature?) The local store didn't have any of them so that I could look at it. What was the name of it? You have to understand this was a couple of years later and I wasn't concentrating on the problem, just idly wondering.
Then, we moved again, from OR to NY. When unpacking in NY, I suddenly came upon a box that was oddly packed. There were a few things on top, a ton of packing paper, and a set of books on the bottom. My missing knitting books, and oh, yes, it was the Mary Schiffmann book which was the second book, but what was the third one?
Today I stumbled across on a blog entry that mentioned Brora Black out of the Amedro book on Shetland Lace. Bingo! I'm so happy.

Of course, it's out of print and nobody has a copy that I can even get a relative price off of...