Last year's: taken from City Paper's Best of Baltimore 2002

Best Used-Book Store
Normals Books and Records
425 E. 31st St., (410) 243-6888, www.normals.com

Another perennial winner, and with good reason. People talk about losing themselves in a good book, but here is a good bookstore in which to get lost. We're not talking literally lost--the stacks and heaps and rows of books at the foot of nearly every set of crammed shelves attest to the fact that Normals (which is co-owned by CP contributor Rupert Wondolowski) isn't a very big place, far too small to comfortably contain its ever-mounting stock of books and certainly too small to swallow shoppers whole. But it's that very volume of titles of all types and vintages (carefully weeded and culled by the store's savvy staff) that can eat up an hour or three of browsing and reading if you're not careful. Whenever we wander into Normals looking for something specific, we wind up stumbling across something we didn't know we needed, or sometimes didn't even know we were interested in before, often sending us off on a completely different tangent and into a whole nother pile of books.

Best Vinyl Store
Normals Books and Records
425 E. 31st St., (410) 243-6888, www.normals.com

Normals doesn't win this category because it carries LP versions of the latest pop albums. It wins because if you're still buying LPs then you're probably not looking for the vinyl version of the new Pink. Divided by genre, Normals' well-organized stock (though half the fun of record shopping is the hunting and pecking) placates both the buding vinyl junkie and the more seasoned connoisseur who just stopped in to see what's in the stacks and walks away with an $8 copy of the Litter's 1969 Emerge on One Way and a smile on his face. Normals is the sort of store you can easily spend a few hours in, not because you're searching for something to buy but because you're trying to decide which of the LPs in your arms you have to buy. Plan your time – and your budget – accordingly.

* voted Best Used-Book Store and Best Vinyl Store
in the Reader's Poll too *

...and from City Paper's Best of Baltimore for 2001

Best Used-Book Store
Normals Books and Records
425 E. 31st St., (410) 243-6888, www.normals.com

According to Plato's Theory of Forms, there exist ideal manifestations of reality that are decidedly superior to the imperfect representations to which we've become accustomed. Let us propose Normals as the Form of Used Bookstore. The 11-year-old Waverly institution has the most volumes of the best books, tended to by a highly knowledgeable staff, thus making for the ideal realized book-buying experience. The enormous and complete fiction section alone embodies the essence of used-book-store-ness. However fearsome its glow may be, real book lovers are drawn to the light of Normals.

Best Vinyl Store
Normals Books and Records
425 E. 31st St., (410) 243-6888, www.normals.com

These days, you've got to be way with-it or way out-of-it to be into vinyl, and Normals is the place for either extreme. For the hard-core vinyl junkie, Normals boasts several rooms full of reasonably priced used records of all persuasions for your collection-building needs. We're especially fond of the store's jazz selection, which owes its strength to the assiduous tending of the finger-poppers who staff the joint. Best of all in these vinyl-starved times, Normals orders and stocks selected new records, especially in the indie-rock, garage, and jazz genres. Meanwhile, if you're just another working-turntable owner looking for a few records to augment your current pile of dusty old platters, Normals is a great place to drop in and crate-dig your way down memory lane.

Best Used-Book Store
Normals Books and Records
Instead of praising Normals for what it has, we're going to focus on what it doesn't have: crap. Normals doesn't sell crap because it doesn't buy crap. And that makes all of the difference. At most used-book stores we have to wade through Tom Clancy thrillers and Stephen King chillers to get to the cool stuff we like. Normals doesn't stock any of that middlebrow nonsense (nor does it stock romance novels, a staple of many used-book stores), so there's plenty of space for hoity-toity classics, good contemporary fiction, whacked-out small-press stuff, seriously depraved rantings, and other literary unmentionables that draw us to the shelves week after week.

Best Vinyl Store
Normals Books and Records
It's bad enough that Normals confounds all our attempts to name another Best Used-Book Store year after year, but now it threatens to expand its hegemony with its selection of round black plastic. The Normals showrooms spill over with bin after bin, pile after pile of reasonably priced used vinyl of all formats and styles. Though the store doesn't seem to mess much with standard collector bait (no Beatles or Elvis rarities here), it boasts a canny selection of classics and oddities. The jazz bins, especially, reflect the connoisseur tastes of the store's buyers--whenever we pop by, they're usually playing something great that we've never heard and find ourselves longing to pry out of their clutches. Normals also stocks a quite respectable sampling of new vinyl, be it indie rock, compilations of vintage garage crud, or classic Impulse! jazz reissues. As is usually the case, frequent visits ensure the best regular scores, but true vinyl fiends will surely want to pack a sack lunch and make a day of it.