Offers tips on identifying, collecting, and caring for furniture, photographs, posters and illustration art, costume jewelry and wristwatches, dolls, toys, advertising and sports memorabilia, and glass and pottery.

Where in Baltimore did the most decorated female spy in American history go to school? Why are Dorothy Parker’s ashes sitting in a memorial garden at the old NAACP headquarters? And which notorious gangster planted cherry trees in Charm City that are still in bloom today? You’ll find answers to the questions you didn’t even know you had in Secret Baltimore: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure. Learn about the connection between the Frank Zappa statue in front of the Enoch Pratt and free-thinkers in Lithuania or about the blind soccer team in Baltimore with a national championship title. From Lamar Jackson’s favorite dessert spot to where Edgar Allan Poe took his last steps and from the childhood home of the nation’s first African-American Supreme Court Justice to a burlesque bar that inspired a Paul Newman movie, you’ll find no shortage of weird, wonderful, and obscure in Maryland’s largest city. Local writer and professor Evan Balkan provides your expert introduction to the poets, gangsters, abolitionists, domestic terrorists, singers, assassins, athletes, and everyone in between who have called his city home. With his book as your guide, you’ll get to know an entirely new side of Charm City.

An engaging and sometimes humorous book about the art of listening. The author suggests that to improve the effectiveness of our listening and communication skills, we should model our behaviour after dogs, the masters of communication.

Profusely illustrated text discusses such antique and collectible items as cookbooks, corkscrews, coverlets, cowboy gear, Currier & Ives, cut glass, decoys, Depression glass, and detective fiction.