Found: Drusilla's Bookshop, Howard Street
"No Mean City" was Mayor McKeldin's tribute to Baltimore--a nearly content-free paean to the founding fathers from a man who is little known today as the father of the Baltimore Inner Harbor redevelopment project. McKeldin was mayor from 1950-1959, one of our few Republicans, and was an old-school guy--erudite, well-bred--everything that Baltimore then and now is really, well, not.
Drusilla herself (is that her name?) told me that the rarest versions of this tome do NOT have McKeldin's signature in them. I was more intrigued by his actual business card, tucked into the frontispiece. Some secretary in 1964 tucked hundreds, if not thousands of her boss's card into these books and mailed them out to... to whom? The book provides no other clue. One imagines it stranded between a 1940's edition of Tale of Two Cities and someone's 1951 yearbook on a shelf in Towson, taken down and sold sometime around 2000 by tired forty-year-old children.
"No Mean City" was Mayor McKeldin's tribute to Baltimore--a nearly content-free paean to the founding fathers from a man who is little known today as the father of the Baltimore Inner Harbor redevelopment project. McKeldin was mayor from 1950-1959, one of our few Republicans, and was an old-school guy--erudite, well-bred--everything that Baltimore then and now is really, well, not.
Drusilla herself (is that her name?) told me that the rarest versions of this tome do NOT have McKeldin's signature in them. I was more intrigued by his actual business card, tucked into the frontispiece. Some secretary in 1964 tucked hundreds, if not thousands of her boss's card into these books and mailed them out to... to whom? The book provides no other clue. One imagines it stranded between a 1940's edition of Tale of Two Cities and someone's 1951 yearbook on a shelf in Towson, taken down and sold sometime around 2000 by tired forty-year-old children.
