The Grand Finale Sale

It is with sadness that we will be closing our doors after 49 years in this community. This decision was exceptionally hard and not without much thought and prayer. We have explored every avenue and yet we faced the inevitable realization that the current retail environment is not sustainable.

Greetings & Readings in the Hunt Valley Towne Centre

We wish to thank our loyal employees who have provided exceptional customer service, some for more than three decades. We are most grateful for the opportunity to serve you, our wonderful customers, with the important events in your lives.

We will celebrate all that we have accomplished in our 49 years and take pride that we have been an integral part of the Baltimore community. We will miss the thousands of friends and employees that have made this dream possible.

We hope you will stop in to see us in the coming weeks and enjoy the savings through Sunday, January 13, 2019.

Amy, Steve, Phyllis, Steven & Fran

Thank you for your kindness and understanding,

The Baum and Spund Families

February 28: Obama

An authoritative, lavishly photographed history of the 44th commander-in-chief's presidency evaluates Obama's in-office achievements and disappointments to assess his qualitative legacy, sharing insights into the public and behind-the-scenes events that marked his eight tumultuous years.

Peter Baker’s authoritative history of the Obama presidency is the first complete account that will stand the test of time. Baker takes the measure of Obama's achievements and disappointments in office and brings into focus the real legacy of the man who, as he described himself, "doesn't look like all the presidents on the dollar bills."

With vivid color photographs by New York Times photographers and others of the events, major and minor, public and behind-the-scenes, that defined Barack Obama's eight years in office, Obama: The Call of History is a portrait in full of America's first African-American president against the background of these tumultuous times.

Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.

February 27: Kill 'Em and Leave

National Book Award winner James McBride goes in search of the "real" James Brown after receiving a tip that promises to uncover the man behind the myth. His surprising journey illuminates not only our understanding of this immensely troubled, misunderstood, and complicated soul genius but the ways in which our cultural heritage has been shaped by Brown's legacy.

Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul is more than a book about James Brown. Brown's rough-and-tumble life, through McBride's lens, is an unsettling metaphor for American life: the tension between North and South, black and white, rich and poor.

McBride's travels take him to forgotten corners of Brown's never-before-revealed history: the country town where Brown's family and thousands of others were displaced by America's largest nuclear power bomb-making facility; a South Carolina field where a long-forgotten cousin recounts, in the dead of night, a fuller history of Brown's sharecropping childhood, which until now has been a mystery.

McBride seeks out the American expatriate in England who co-created the James Brown sound, visits the trusted right-hand manager who worked with Brown for 41 years, and interviews Brown's most influential non-musical creation, his "adopted son," the Reverend Al Sharpton.

He describes the stirring visit of Michael Jackson to the Augusta, Georgia, funeral home where the King of Pop sat up all night with the body of his musical godfather, spends hours talking with Brown's first wife, and lays bare the Dickensian legal contest over James Brown's estate, a fight that has consumed careers; prevented any money from reaching the poor schoolchildren in Georgia and South Carolina, as instructed in his will; cost Brown's estate millions in legal fees; and left James Brown's body to lie for more than eight years in a gilded coffin in his daughter's yard in South Carolina.

James McBride is one of the most distinctive and electric literary voices in America today, and part of the pleasure of his narrative is being in his presence, coming to understand Brown through McBride’s own insights as a black musician with Southern roots. Kill 'Em and Leave is a song unearthing and celebrating James Brown's great legacy: the cultural landscape of America today.

Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.

February 26: Five-Carat Soul

The National Book Award-winning author James McBride presents a never-before-published collection of stories that are funny and poignant, insightful and unpredictable and imaginative and authentic, and explore the ways we learn from the world and the people around us.

This is exciting new fiction from James McBride, the first since his National Book Award–winning novel The Good Lord Bird.

The stories in Five-Carat Soul spring from the place where identity, humanity, and history converge. They're all told with McBride's unrivaled storytelling skill and meticulous eye for character and detail.

McBride explores the ways we learn from the world and the people around us. An antiques dealer discovers that a legendary toy commissioned by Civil War General Robert E. Lee now sits in the home of a black minister in Queens. Five strangers find themselves thrown together and face unexpected judgment. An American president draws inspiration from a conversation he overhears in a stable. And members of The Five-Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band recount stories from their own messy and hilarious lives.

As McBride did in his National Book award-winning The Good Lord Bird and his bestselling The Color of Water, he writes with humor and insight about how we struggle to understand who we are in a world we don’t fully comprehend. The result is a surprising, perceptive, and evocative collection of stories that is also a moving exploration of our human condition.

Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.

February 25: Rest in Power

Trayvon Martin's parents take readers beyond the news cycle with an account only they could give: the intimate story of a tragically foreshortened life and the rise of a movement.

On a February evening in 2012, in a small town in central Florida, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was walking home with candy and a can of juice in hand and talking on the phone with a friend when a fatal encounter with a gun-wielding neighborhood watchman ended his young life. The watchman was briefly detained by the police and released. Trayvon's father - a truck driver named Tracy - tried to get answers from the police but was shut down and ignored.

Trayvon's mother, a civil servant for the city of Miami, was paralyzed by the news of her son's death and lost in mourning, unable to leave her room for days. But in a matter of weeks, their son's name would be spoken by President Obama, honored by professional athletes, and passionately discussed all over traditional and social media. And at the head of a growing nationwide campaign for justice were Trayvon's parents, who - driven by their intense love for their lost son - discovered their voices, gathered allies, and launched a movement that would change the country.

Six years after his tragic death, Trayvon Martin's name is still evoked every day. He has become a symbol of social justice activism, as has his hauntingly familiar image: the photo of a child still in the process of becoming a young man, wearing a hoodie and gazing silently at the camera. But who was Trayvon Martin, before he became, in death, an icon? And how did one black child's death on a dark, rainy street in a small Florida town become the match that lit a civil rights crusade?

Rest in Power: The Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin, told through the compelling alternating narratives of Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, answers, for the first time, those questions from the most intimate of sources. It's the story of the beautiful and complex child they lost, the cruel unresponsiveness of the police and the hostility of the legal system, and the inspiring journey they took from grief and pain to power, and from tragedy and senselessness to meaning.

Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.

February 24: You're Not Listening - Baltimore Youth Speak Out

The book was first released ten years ago, but Anna K. Stone, editor of You're Not Listening: Baltimore Youth Speak Out and veteran Baltimore City School teacher, thought it was important to highlight the lack of change that has occurred in the Baltimore City School system when it comes to listening to Baltimore City Youth.

Thug, deficient, lazy, irresponsible, disadvantaged. Too often, urban youth - particularly African American youth - are portrayed as caricatures. Such labels persist in part because adults are unwilling or unable to listen to what teenagers are saying about themselves.

You're Not Listening: Baltimore Youth Speak Out provides a forum for young people to tell their own stories in their own words about their own lives and in the process, challenge readers to reexamine the predispositions and stereotypes they may hold about cities and city kids.

The young people who speak out in these pages are all growing up amidst underfunded, largely segregated schools, wages that do not keep up with inflation, inadequate health care, substandard housing, and racial profiling. But urban teenagers are not monolithic in their responses to such realities. Some try harder than others to do well in school, some - but not all - work to supplement the family income, and some have strong opinions about racism and poverty, while others have little interest in discussing the subject.

Like all teenagers, they must navigate the choppy waters of adolescent development: forge their own academic, career and sexual identities, establish peer relationships, and negotiate autonomy from parents. They do so in ways that resist the labels imposed by many adults, those who think they know city kids after a superficial glance.

Like all teenagers, they long to be heard and understood. To read this book with an open mind is to take the risk of saying to these thirty-four young people: "I am listening."

Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.

February 23: 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro

A history of African-Americans in a unique question-and-answer format.

In an homage to Joel Augustus Rogers' 1957 work, Henry Louis Gates Jr. relies on the latest scholarship to offer an overview of African, diasporic and African-American history in Q-and-A format, including such queries as: Who were Africa's first ambassadors to Europe?; Who was the first black president in North America?; Did Lincoln really free the slaves?; and more.

The first edition of Joel Augustus Rogers' now legendary 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof, published in 1934, was billed as "A Negro 'Believe It or Not.'" Rogers's little book was priceless because he was delivering enlightenment and pride, steeped in historical research, to a people too long starved on the lie that they were worth nothing. For African Americans of the Jim Crow era, Rogers was their first black history teacher. But Rogers was not always shy about embellishing the "facts" and minimizing ambiguity; neither was he above shock journalism now and then.

With élan and erudition - and with winning enthusiasm - Henry Louis Gates, Jr. gives us a corrective yet loving homage to Roger's work. Relying on the latest scholarship, 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro leads us on a romp through African, diasporic, and African-American history. Among the 100 questions: Who was history's wealthiest person? What percentage of white Americans have recent African ancestry? Why did free black people living in the South before the end of the Civil War stay there? Who was the first black head of state in modern Western history? Where was the first Underground Railroad? Who was the first black American woman to be a self-made millionaire? Which black man made many of our favorite household products better?

Here is a surprising, inspiring, sometimes boldly mischievous - all the while highly instructive and entertaining - compendium of historical curiosities intended to illuminate the sheer complexity and diversity of being "Negro" in the world.

Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.