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Normal’s Books & Records is a Baltimore institution. A perpetual recipient of City Paper’s Best Used Bookstore award, and counting John Waters among its many fans, the Waverly landmark is more than just a great used bookstore, though it is most certainly that, with a fantastic selection of both common and obscure titles, and to-the-point section headers like “Dreams” and “Labor and Utopia.” It’s also a record store with an impressive collection of vinyl and home to the Red Room, a space dedicated to “radically experimental culture, ” like offbeat music and performances.
An ongoing search for a hard-to-find collection of short stories inspired a recent trip to Normal’s. While he was ringing up the book (and a few others–it’s impossible to browse the shelves and leave only with what you came for), I asked co-owner Rubert Wondolowski about his favorite work of fiction. He paused, considering the question.
“Probably Auto-da-Fé,” he finally answered, referring to Elias Canetti’s epic novel about the perils of insulated intellectualism, “Because it’s really dark and really hilarious at the same time. You can re-read it and get something different each time.”
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