Baltimore

A friend and I went up to Baltimore this weekend to visit another friend of ours there.

We had a lovely time--lunch, where I tried bahn mi (a Vietnamese sandwich); lots of vintage clothes shopping, where we tried on hats, and I found a bargain of a Vera Neumann scarf; inspection of my friend's husband's collection of ephemera (he's an archivist and collects random things, including post cards and QSL cards [which people exchanged back in the day for amateur radio broadcasts], and he gave me a first day cover of a Chagall window when I raved about them!).

However, the highlight of the trip for me was our visit to The Book Thing--the free bookstore of Baltimore! My friend, I think not entirely jokingly, maintained that it was run by a bunch of Marxists who wanted to liberate books from the market. They stamp in the book:

"Not For Resale
THIS IS A FREE BOOK"

All I know is that I'm happy when people want to liberate books from the market into my care. It was slightly overwhelming to be there (the "shop" is neither huge, nor excellent--there were shelves and shelves with books I've never heard of on them)--there were so many books, and they were free, but I wasn't supposed to take them all. I kept telling myself that I needed to leave some for the other people.

My favorite find was To Catch an Angel by Robert Russell, a book that's now out of print. Robert Russell was the father of my father's friend, and we visited with him on several occasions. Russell was a remarkable man and an English professor who writes about his life and blindness. He married the woman who was hired to read to him his textbooks at Oxford.