Throwback Thursday - Saint-Exupery, Silhouette Special Edition, Cavendish's History

 

Throwback Thursday is a weekly meme hosted by The Housework Can Wait and Never too fond of Books.

Several old favorites walked across my desk in the past month.

One from my days as a brick and mortar seller was a batch of early Silhouette Special Editions from when Silhouette was still published by Pocket. The advent of Silhouette and other similar lines from other U.S. publishers finally forced Harlequin to bring a lot of American authors onboard and expand their offerings.

A second was a story about Antoine de Saint-Exupery that I heard on the radio. I knew Saint-Exupery had been a pilot in World War II but I did not know he wrote his most famous book, The Little Prince, in French, while a refugee within a few miles of where I live and that he then returned to the war only to die in combat.

Finally, I found a collection of Cavendish's History of World War II. Cavendish published the History in 96 weekly installments in 1973 and 1974 (in the U.S., a few years earlier in the UK). An interesting concept and, for the time, a well-done publication, fit for both the historian and the amateur.

What's crossed you desk recently?

Throwback Thursday - A Simpler Romance

On this day I am excited to find and participate in this hop. For six years I owned a small brick and mortar used book store whose claim to fame was the largest collection of romance novels on Long Island. I would talk to the customers about the various "harlequins" as well as the "single titles" and the authors and subgenres.

While the Romance genre as a whole has come a very long way and is clearly mainstream, it does mirror the society in which we live. Nostalgia being what it is, one remembers a different kind of romance back in the day.

It is to that "different" romance I now harken. A simpler romance where roles were simpler and "courting" was more important and it was important to be with and see someone as opposed to text or email. This time is captured in the Harlequin Romance, Silhouette Romance, and Harlequin Presents series form the 1970s and 1980s. They are clean, straightforward, and short; easily read in a couple hours and yet, often, well-written.

Robyn Donald, Sara Wood, Anne Weale, and Sue Craven were always popular in my shop among this subtype. I recommend looking up the series or the authors for a short, clean, nostalgic romance.

Romance Novels - A General Discussion

All my previous posts have been personal observations and non-commercial. This one is different, in a way. This one is targeted specifically to helping sales at my various pre-read book outlets, but it is also a(n) (interesting?) personal story.

When I owned an actual brick and mortar (funny thing is, it WAS made of brick and mortar) used book store, the majority of sales were romance novels of one subtype or another. Probably 60-70% of the inventory and in-store sales were romance. Until I bought the store I knew nothing of the genre, its writers, publishers, history, nothing.

But I would talk with my customers and learned what they liked and why. I also developed a business relationship with Harlequin, THE biggest publisher in the genre. I now consider myself the most expert straight men on the subject of the people I know.  Perhaps one day I’ll finish editing my “History of the Bodice-Ripper” and publish it.

As with most everything you learn because you choose to, I have enjoyed the process. I also have enjoyed the conversations I have had, with stronger and stronger grasp of the topics, with readers. I still prefer, personally, to read what would be dubbed more manly fiction – historical yarns like the Age of Sail in the previous blog, or thrillers/mysteries like John D. MacDonald and westerns like Louis L’Amour and Luke Short.

Surprisingly (not!) I still have a very large inventory of romance novels, all subgenres, dating from the 1960s to about 2007 with any selection (only scattered titles after that).  This includes significant selections of serial romance novels (generically known as harlequins, even though published by many labels).

Some examples:

I have 29 titles written by Robyn Donald, 32 by Anne Mather, 25 by Lisa Jackson, and 25 by Diana Palmer.  I have literally hundreds of titles in the main series: Harlequin Romance, Silhouette Romance, Special Edition, Desire, Loveswept, etc. And I have hundreds, if not thousands, of “stand-alone” titles from Daphne du Maurier through Barbara Cartland to Nora Roberts and Luanne Rice.

If this is an area of interest to you and you are missing one or more back titles, please browse along. At least on the Biblio account linked here there is free shipping and a coupon for 50 cents off your second and subsequent books on one order.

Pleasant reading!