Ned Sparrow Books

Trains sound different in this old Victorian general store, built in 1881 and located just across the tracks from the old train station of Lutherville. The sound of the light rail evokes not so much the commuters passing the beltway north on the old Ma and Pa (MD and Pennsylvania) Line, or workers heading south towards Ruxton and Mt. Washington and Baltimore, but the commerce and industry of the nineteenth century.

The earlier age is evoked in period furniture and paintings, a deep red rococo revival settee from 1856, not in crushed velvet as the auctioneer had described it, but in cotton silk. A former English professor and modernist literary scholar, Sparrow takes some relish in sorting out “all the past that’s living and fit to live,” as Ezra Pound had it. Many books, says the professor, “I keep around because they’re just too handsome not to admire.” Those pretty books, folios and quartos in tooled leather bindings, are prized by decorators as well as readers and collectors. Today there are over 9,000 books, many first editions, and many signed, ranging from literature and art to history and music.

The past retains its usefulness: in the post-office addition to the main general store, Sparrow catalogues new arrivals, a stack of Twain to his left as he writes painstaking descriptions of the books, a leather bound Century Magazine annual on the floral pattern cookbook stand to his right, gently opened to the table of contents.

Until the 1950s the store was open shelves and kegs of flour and oil and penny candy in tubs, and Messrs. Rogers and, before him, Leisenring, were also the postmasters of the small town. They might be content to know that commerce continues in this home.