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.

Returning to her Midwest roots, award-winning author Jane Kirkpatrick draws a page from her grandmother's photo album to capture the interplay between shadow and light, temptation and faith that marks a woman's pursuit of her dreams. She took exquisite photographs, but her heart was the true image exposed. Fifteen-year-old Jessie Ann Gaebele loves nothing more than capturing a gorgeous Minnesota landscape when the sunlight casts its most mesmerizing shadows. So when F.J. Bauer hires her in 1907 to assist in his studio and darkroom, her dreams for a career in photography appear to find root in reality. With the infamous hazards of the explosive powder used for lighting and the toxic darkroom chemicals, photography is considered a man' s profession. Yet Jessie shows remarkable talent in both the artistry and business of running a studio. She proves less skillful, however, at managing her growing attraction to the very married Mr. Bauer. This luminous coming-of-age tale deftly exposes the intricate shadows that play across every dream worth pursuing–and the irresistible light that beckons the dreamer on.

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.