Roumanian Journey by Sacheverell Sitwell (1938) is the most atmospheric account of pre-war Romania, written by an English aesthete who wandered through the country at leisure. Sitwell is more interested in peasant embroidery and Orthodox icons than in politics, which makes his account of Maramureș and the Carpathians curiously timeless. The writing is ornate but rewards patience; you will recognise the landscape he describes.
Along the Enchanted Way by William Blacker (2009) is the essential modern book on rural Maramureș. Blacker, an Englishman, went to live in a Maramureș village in the 1990s, learned Romanian and the local dialect, worked the fields with his neighbours, and eventually fell in love with a local woman. The book he wrote about it is deeply observed, unsentimental, and full of the texture of village life — the haymaking, the pigs, the plum brandy, the church, the slow rhythm of the agricultural year. It is the best preparation for a visit and the best souvenir of one.
Romanian Folk Art: A Guide to Living Traditions by Lucy Abel Smith covers the crafts of rural Romania with careful attention to regional variation. The Maramureș wooden gate tradition gets its own section, with illustrations of the carved geometric and solar motifs that identify individual villages by their decorative vocabulary. Useful for understanding what you are looking at when you walk through village after village of elaborately carved gates.
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori (1979) is not about Maramureș specifically but about the world that produced it: the multiethnic, polyglot, now-vanished society of the former Austro-Hungarian borderlands in which Romanians, Hungarians, Jews, Germans, and Ukrainians lived in uneasy proximity. Von Rezzori grew up in nearby Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi, in Ukraine), and his accounts of that lost world — its snobberies, its beauties, its cruelties — provide essential context for the region's complicated history.