These vintage and contemporary images of Baltimore movie palaces explore the changing face of Charm City with stories and commentary by filmmakers. Since the dawn of popular cinema, Baltimore has been home to hundreds of movie theaters, many of which became legendary monuments to popular culture. But by 2016, the number of cinemas had dwindled to only three. Many theaters have been boarded up, burned out, or repurposed. In this volume, Baltimore Sun photojournalist Amy Davis pairs vintage black-and-white images of downtown movie palaces and modest neighborhood theaters with her own contemporary color photos. Flickering Treasures delves into Baltimore’s cultural and cinematic history, from its troubling legacy of racial segregation to the technological changes that have shaped both American cities and the movie exhibition business. Images of Electric Park, the Century, the Hippodrome, and scores of other beloved venues are punctuated by stories and interviews, as well as commentary from celebrated Baltimore filmmakers Barry Levinson and John Waters. A map and timeline reveal the one-time presence of movie houses in every corner of the city, and fact boxes include the years of operation, address, architect, and seating capacity for each of the 72 theaters profiled, along with a brief description of each theater’s distinct character.

With his storyteller's gift, Jameson relates episodes from early explorers through the colonial period, the Civil War, the settling of the West, and the roaring 1920s. As a professional treasure hunter, he has followed the trails of many of the lost mines and buried treasures he describes. Sample treasures include Sir Francis Drake Treasure, Benedict Arnold Treasure, Lafayette's Sunken Riches, Maryland's Lost Silver Mine, The Wandering Confederate Treasury, Lost Treasure of the Gray Ghost, Oklahoma Outlaw Cache, and Lost Spanish Gold in the Sandia Mountains.

Following on the heels of their incredibly successful The Ruins of Detroit, this major new project by the prolific French photographer duo Marchand/Meffre, poignantly eulogizes and celebrates the tattered remains of hundreds of movie theaters across America. They are in every American city and town—grandiose movie palaces, constructed during the heyday of the entertainment industry, that now stand abandoned, empty, decaying, or repurposed. Since 2005, the acclaimed photographic duo Marchand/Meffre have been traveling across the US to visit these early 20th-century relics. In hundreds of lushly colored images, they have captured the rich architectural diversity of the theaters’ exteriors, from neo renaissance to neo-Gothic, art nouveau to Bauhaus, and neo-Byzantine to Jugendstill. They have also stepped inside to capture the commonalities of a dying culture— crumbling plaster, rows of broken crushed-velvet seats, peeling paint, defunct equipment, and abandoned concession stands—as well as their transformation into bingo halls, warehouses, fitness centers, flea markets, parking lots, and grocery stores. Using a large format camera, the photographers’ carefully composed images range from landscape exteriors to starkly beautiful closeups. Presented here in a gorgeous oversized format, exquisitely printed with superior inks and spot varnish, this illustrated eulogy for the American movie palace is certain to become a modern-day classic.

A spellbinding new novel of contraband masterpieces, tragic love, and the unexpected legacies of forgotten crimes, Ayelet Waldman’s Love and Treasure weaves a tale around the fascinating, true history of the Hungarian Gold Train in the Second World War. In 1945 on the outskirts of Salzburg, victorious American soldiers capture a train filled with unspeakable riches: piles of fine gold watches; mountains of fur coats; crates filled with wedding rings, silver picture frames, family heirlooms, and Shabbat candlesticks passed down through generations. Jack Wiseman, a tough, smart New York Jew, is the lieutenant charged with guarding this treasure—a responsibility that grows more complicated when he meets Ilona, a fierce, beautiful Hungarian who has lost everything in the ravages of the Holocaust. Seventy years later, amid the shadowy world of art dealers who profit off the sins of previous generations, Jack gives a necklace to his granddaughter, Natalie Stein, and charges her with searching for an unknown woman—a woman whose portrait and fate come to haunt Natalie, a woman whose secret may help Natalie to understand the guilt her grandfather will take to his grave and to find a way out of the mess she has made of her own life. A story of brilliantly drawn characters—a suave and shady art historian, a delusive and infatuated Freudian, a family of singing circus dwarfs fallen into the clutches of Josef Mengele, and desperate lovers facing choices that will tear them apart—Love and Treasure is Ayelet Waldman’s finest novel to date: a sad, funny, richly detailed work that poses hard questions about the value of precious things in a time when life itself has no value, and about the slenderest of chains that can bind us to the griefs and passions of the past. This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.

The brief Russian presence in California yielded some of the earliest ethnography of Native Californians and some of the best collections of their material culture. Unstudied by western scholars because of their being housed in Russian museums, they are presented here for the first time in an English language volume. Descriptions of early nineteenth-century travelers such as von Wrangel and Voznesenskii are followed by a catalog of objects ranging from hunting weapons to household objects to ritual dress to musical instruments, games, and gift objects. This catalog of objects includes over 150 images, many in full color. An essential volume for those interested in the ethnology, archaeology, art, and cultures of Native Californians.

From the golden age of art movies and underground cinema to X-rated porn, splatter films, and midnight movies, this breathtaking thriller is a tour de force of cinematic fact and fantasy, full of metaphysical mysteries that will haunt the dreams of every moviegoer. Jonathan Gates could not have anticipated that his student studies would lead him to uncover the secret history of the movies--a tale of intrigue, deception, and death that stretches back to the 14th century. But he succumbs to what will be a lifelong obsession with the mysterious Max Castle, a nearly forgotten genius of the silent screen who later became the greatest director of horror films, only to vanish in the 1940s, at the height of his talent. Now, 20 years later, as Jonathan seeks the truth behind Castle's disappearance, the innocent entertainments of his youth--the sexy sirens, the screwball comedies, the high romance--take on a sinister appearance. His tortured quest takes him from Hollywood's Poverty Row into the shadowy lore of ancient religious heresies. He encounters a cast of exotic characters, including Orson Welles and John Huston, who teach him that there's more to film than meets the eye, and journeys through the dark side of nostalgia, where the Three Stooges and Shirley Temple join company with an alien god whose purposes are anything but entertainment.

The tale begins over three-hundred years ago, when the Fair People—the goblins, fairies, dragons, and other fabled and fantastic creatures of a dozen lands—fled the Old World for the New, seeking haven from the ways of Man. With them came their precious jewels: diamonds, rubies, emeralds, pearls... But then the Fair People vanished, taking with them their twelve fabulous treasures. And they remained hidden until now... Across North America, these twelve treasures, over ten-thousand dollars in precious jewels, are buried. The key to finding each can be found within the twelve full color paintings and verses of The Secret. Yet The Secret is much more than that. At long last, you can learn not only the whereabouts of the Fair People's treasure, but also the modern forms and hiding places of their descendants: the Toll Trolls, Maitre D'eamons, Elf Alphas, Tupperwerewolves, Freudian Sylphs, Culture Vultures, West Ghosts and other delightful creatures in the world around us. The Secret is a field guide to them all. Many "armchair treasure hunt" books have been published over the years, most notably Masquerade (1979) by British artist Kit Williams. Masquerade promised a jewel-encrusted golden hare to the first person to unravel the riddle that Williams cleverly hid in his art. In 1982, while everyone in Britain was still madly digging up hedgerows and pastures in search of the golden hare, The Secret: A Treasure Hunt was published in America. The previous year, author and publisher Byron Preiss had traveled to 12 locations in the continental U.S. (and possibly Canada) to secretly bury a dozen ceramic casques. Each casque contained a small key that could be redeemed for one of 12 jewels Preiss kept in a safe deposit box in New York. The key to finding the casques was to match one of 12 paintings to one of 12 poetic verses, solve the resulting riddle, and start digging. Since 1982, only two of the 12 casques have been recovered. The first was located in Grant Park, Chicago, in 1984 by a group of students. The second was unearthed in 2004 in Cleveland by two members of the Quest4Treasure forum. Preiss was killed in an auto accident in the summer of 2005, but the hunt for his casques continues.