The Book Thing Bounces Back

A Baltimore literary institution gets reborn, thanks to the community.

- Gabriella Souza

This is a story about loving something so much you dedicate your life to it—about doing something not for the acclaim, but because it’s the right thing to do. Like all of life, it’s also a story about growth and loss, success and pain, and, perhaps most importantly, it’s about how, even when everything you’ve strived for goes up in flames, if you’ve done good work, you might find a community of people there to raise it up again. This is the story of The Book Thing, a place that is a little difficult to describe. It’s not a bookstore, because you can’t buy the thousands of titles it offers, and it’s not an exchange, because you don’t have to give books away to take them. It’s a place where, mind-bogglingly, you can take donated books for free, as many as you like, with no catch. And like many ventures in Baltimore that run largely on commitment and heart, it seems like it should have run out of steam—but miraculously, it hasn’t. Not even when a fire reduced it to a smoldering heap in March 2016.

The Book Thing has been nurturing readers since 1999, when Russell Wattenberg, who arrived in Baltimore somewhat by accident, turned his hobby of collecting books and giving them away into a full-time thing—“Russell’s book thing,” as the patrons at the former Mt. Vernon mainstay Dougherty’s, where he used to tend bar, called it. The name stuck. The old warehouse near Waverly that Wattenberg used as The Book Thing headquarters—where books lined the walls, stacked along bookshelves that turned the rooms into a veritable literary maze—became a haven for bibliophiles who carried their finds by the armful. And Wattenberg could always count on more books, handed over in shopping bags, milk crates, or cardboard boxes tinged green with mold from years in dark, dank basements.