Last Night
Last Night: Baltimore Sunday Morning Edition
Why is Josh filing posts about the Bellevue City Council's B7 light rail proposal? Because I'm on the East Coast (which people in the West insist on describing, inexplicably, as "back East"), hanging out in Baltimore and D.C. for the week. On Sunday, I spent a couple of hours wandering around the Baltimore Book Thing, a place I can only describe as a free book store—a place that gives used books away, seriously, for free. It's like the Seattle Public Library sale at Magnuson Park, only smaller and, you know, free.
The Book Thing, located in a nondescript cinderblock building divided into several low-ceilinged rooms, is musty and disorganized and full of more trash than treasure—your typical used bookstore, in other words. Books on US politics seem particularly popular (or at least frequently recycled): I counted half a dozen Kitty Kelley biographies and the vast majority of Doris Kearns Johnson's scholarship on LBJ, but not a handful of books on World War II. Also lots of outdated books on travel (the Exxon Guide to Motoring in Europe, 1990 edition) and guides to etiquette.
At any rate, I found some gems: The Lone Star: The Life of John Connally, by James Reston; American Fried, a food memoir by Calvin Trillin; the 1893 version of Roberts' Rules of Order; and an amazing, circa-1960 home-ec textbook called, simply, FOOD, which features technological marvels like the Rotolactor automated milking machine, chemical fertilizers (a "miracle worker") and DDT.
Apparently, this Book Thing thing is no secret—it's been featured in the Washington Post and Christian Science Monitor, and even sparked a miniscandal when the Baltimore Sun chided its founder, Russell Wattenberg, for selling a few books on Amazon and Ebay to help pay his bills. But it's new to me, and seems like just the kind of thing that would catch on in a hippie-dippie West Coast city like Portland or even Seattle.
The Book Thing, located in a nondescript cinderblock building divided into several low-ceilinged rooms, is musty and disorganized and full of more trash than treasure—your typical used bookstore, in other words. Books on US politics seem particularly popular (or at least frequently recycled): I counted half a dozen Kitty Kelley biographies and the vast majority of Doris Kearns Johnson's scholarship on LBJ, but not a handful of books on World War II. Also lots of outdated books on travel (the Exxon Guide to Motoring in Europe, 1990 edition) and guides to etiquette.
At any rate, I found some gems: The Lone Star: The Life of John Connally, by James Reston; American Fried, a food memoir by Calvin Trillin; the 1893 version of Roberts' Rules of Order; and an amazing, circa-1960 home-ec textbook called, simply, FOOD, which features technological marvels like the Rotolactor automated milking machine, chemical fertilizers (a "miracle worker") and DDT.
Apparently, this Book Thing thing is no secret—it's been featured in the Washington Post and Christian Science Monitor, and even sparked a miniscandal when the Baltimore Sun chided its founder, Russell Wattenberg, for selling a few books on Amazon and Ebay to help pay his bills. But it's new to me, and seems like just the kind of thing that would catch on in a hippie-dippie West Coast city like Portland or even Seattle.
