Normal's Books & Records

Normal's Books & Records Normals Books & Records was started in 1990 by a collective of nine musicians, writers, artists and

The working plan of Normal's was to have cultural workers provide lasting works of culture to the public at decent, affordable prices. We happily sold vinyl lps in 1990 when many were consigning them to the dustbins of history and we still love and prefer a good, honest book to an overpriced electronic download that can't be shared or displayed on one's shelf, acting as a work of art and/or time machine/memory aid. Sure in five years entertainment will solely be transferred via a chip planted in one's bioport and the only writing that will be read will be tweets, but we'll all be long gone like the glaciers and attention span by then. Stop by, mingle with interesting people, support small local business, keep us off the streets, save at least one building from being filled by a Subway sandwich shop or nail salon.

All originals, vg+ to near mint! is missing the cd. These will be in the racks tomorrow at 1:30.
09/18/2026

All originals, vg+ to near mint! is missing the cd. These will be in the racks tomorrow at 1:30.

09/18/2026

At 28, Annie Dillard wrote a book about a Virginia creek and the terrifying beauty of being alive. A year later, it won the Pulitzer Prize.

Dillard, who died Tuesday at 81, never seemed interested in becoming the kind of literary celebrity her success could have made her. Instead, she became one of America’s most distinctive observers of nature, faith, death and consciousness.

Born Meta Ann Doak in Pittsburgh in 1945, she arrived at Hollins College rebellious, voraciously curious and already obsessed with books. There she studied under poet and creative-writing professor Richard Dillard. He became her first husband while she was still a student. Dillard later recalled that she had never intended to marry young and that her professor had persuaded her. Their marriage lasted a decade.

Then came Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Published in 1974, it transformed an ordinary suburban Virginia waterway into a meditation on beauty, brutality and existence. Comparisons to Henry David Thoreau were inevitable. Dillard had written her master’s thesis on him. But she was no imitator. Her nature could be magnificent one moment and horrifying the next.

The book won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Dillard was only 29.

She kept writing, producing essays, memoir, criticism, poetry and fiction, while teaching for more than two decades at Wesleyan University. Yet as the years passed, she increasingly withdrew from public literary life.

Her third marriage began almost like something from a novel. After reading Robert Richardson’s biography of Thoreau, Dillard wrote him a fan letter. They met, fell in love and married in 1988. They remained together until his death in 2020.

In 2015, President Barack Obama presented her with the National Humanities Medal.

Annie Dillard spent her career staring at things most of us walk past: insects, water, trees, darkness, silence.

Then she made us look too.

Closing our Saturday festivities will be music by the legendary outsider band, performance art group & writers at 5pm...
09/18/2026

Closing our Saturday festivities will be music by the legendary outsider band, performance art group & writers at 5pm. They’ve been played on NPR & John Peel’s show and now Idea Books in Switzerland has published a beautiful collection of their early art and pondering.


“The Tinklers are an outsider band from Baltimore, Maryland, founded in 1979 by Charles Brohawn and Chris Mason. Aside from singing and playing music, both band members are also active creators of visual art, poetry, and artists’ books. With ‘The Tinklers Charts and Stories’ they present an anthology of selected visual work, including the drawings from one irreverently humorous performance titled “The Tinklers History of the World”, which featured the duo playing songs while walking along a 15-metre-long visual timeline of various events in world history. In addition, the volume includes “The Tinklers Songs and Charts”, “Home by the River”, and “The Tinklers Encyclopedia”.

Author is our Saturday, September 19, 4pm reader. We’re really excited she could make it to read from her brand new no...
09/17/2026

Author is our Saturday, September 19, 4pm reader. We’re really excited she could make it to read from her brand new novel Avalon, Rise. Our pal Adam Robinson was wise enough to publish her first book Valparaiso Round the Horn and now she’s in the bigtime on FSG & shoving William F. Buckley off his chair on the Cavett show.

Madeline ffitch cofounded the punk theater company Missoula Oblongata and is part of the direct-action collective Appalachia Resist! Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, Guernica, and elsewhere. She is the author of the story collection Valparaiso, Round the Horn and the novel Stay and Fight, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Lambda Literary Award.

Our Saturday September 19, 3pm Book Festival reader, Joel Dailey, coming all the way from New Orleans. I’ve corresponded...
09/16/2026

Our Saturday September 19, 3pm Book Festival reader, Joel Dailey, coming all the way from New Orleans. I’ve corresponded with him since the ‘80s and was a longtime fan and occasional contributor to his noble Fell Swoop magazine. I believe Chris Toll’s last reading may have been one set up in New Orleans by Joel.

From high atop FSI (Fell Swoop International) Headquarters in New Orleans, Joel Dailey edits and publishes SWOOPCARDS, an ongoing series of letterpress postcards & broadsides. His latest book is NEW DETAILS EMERGE (New Books, 2023). His previous books all from Lavender Ink include: LOWER 48, MY PSYCHIC DOGS MY LIFE & INDUSTRIAL LOOP.

From high atop FSI (Fell Swoop International) Headquarters in New Orleans, Joel Dailey edits and publishes SWOOPCARDS, an ongoing series of letterpress postcards & broadsides. His latest book is NEW DETAILS EMERGE (New Books, 2023). His previous books all from Lavender Ink include: LOWER 48, MY PSYCHIC DOGS MY LIFE & INDUSTRIAL LOOP.

Priced hitting the shelves tomorrow. , Zu, “Berlin Is Burning”, JD Emmanuel, Oxbow, “Ohnomite, Vinyl Retentive...
09/16/2026

Priced hitting the shelves tomorrow. , Zu, “Berlin Is Burning”, JD Emmanuel, Oxbow, “Ohnomite, Vinyl Retentive with insert.

Our 2:30 reader on Saturday, September 19, at the , Buck Downs.BIO: Through postcards, slaptags, voicemails and other e...
09/15/2026

Our 2:30 reader on Saturday, September 19, at the , Buck Downs.
BIO: Through postcards, slaptags, voicemails and other ephemera, Buck Downs creates a body of poetry as expansive and intimate as life and death. Recent book projects include NICE NOSE (Buck Downs Dot Com) and Mystical Hobby of Christ: The Poetry of Chris Toll (lack mountain/ZDWP).

I hate to risk distracting you from the book festival - stay focused on the coming two days of Waverly glory! - but when...
09/15/2026

I hate to risk distracting you from the book festival - stay focused on the coming two days of Waverly glory! - but when the magic dust of the Book Festival & High Zero clears, life will go on with more quality offerings.
Our poet friend has a new book out & his daughter .magnus has a new album out, so they’re taking the family out on the road & hitting Normals October 3, 8pm.
Singer-songwriter Hero Magnus comes to Baltimore with her debut album How Do You Leave a Warm Dark Place. Now based in Brooklyn, New York, Hero grew up in Alexandria and began her music career around the Washington, DC hardcore scene, working for legendary studio Inner Ear and opening for punk bands. As an undergraduate at Yale, she released her first EP Make Me a Man, which explores q***r love and desire through adaptations of stories from ancient mythology.How Do You Leave a Warm Dark Place is an indie rock and indie folk record about newness and its inevitable end. It’s about our relationship to home, childhood, the womb, and all the other comfortable but transitory places where we shelter. The album was produced and mixed by James Duncan (Taraneh, Pisha, Nara’s Room) and mastered by Heather Jones (sadurn, MJ Lenderman, They Are Gutting a Body of Water). Hero has been touring with the album since its April release across the East Coast, as well as in New Orleans and San Francisco, and all over NYC.
Poet Magus Magnus latest book The Killing Joke released this summer from BlazeVOX [books]. With The Killing Joke, Magnus activates the Trickster Archetype, tracing three points of focus: Killing Joke, the post-punk band; the Joker-centered Batman graphic novel by Alan Moore and its variations in different media; and the first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus with its lethal joke sketch – “no one can hear it and live.” Throughout this work there is the overriding image dialectic of the trickster here as jester, as Evil Clown, as death symbol. Last laugh’s on us. Acclaimed comedian Tig Notaro said of Magnus’ The Killing Joke: “This book is just more proof that comedy can kill. And has.”

Poet kicks off Saturday, September 19th day of readings inside the shop at 2pm.Thea Brown is the author of three colle...
09/14/2026

Poet kicks off Saturday, September 19th day of readings inside the shop at 2pm.
Thea Brown is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Loner Forensics (Northwestern University Press 2023). Recent poems can be found in Bennington Review, Kenyon Review, Coma, Sixth Finch, the tiny, Action, Spectacle, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore and teaches creative writing at the George Washington University.

Will get back into the vinyl, promise! Just tried to refill cd racks with these juicy ones. In a nice place of being dri...
09/13/2026

Will get back into the vinyl, promise! Just tried to refill cd racks with these juicy ones. In a nice place of being driven mad with too many great objects! The book festival is next weekend also.

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425 E 31st Street
Baltimore, MD
21218

Opening Hours

Monday 11am - 6pm
Tuesday 11am - 6pm
Wednesday 11am - 6pm
Thursday 11am - 6pm
Friday 11am - 6pm
Saturday 10am - 6pm
Sunday 11am - 6pm

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