titles (“Bonds of Desire,” “Bonds of Courage”) on its digital imprint, Carina Press. A few months after James’s books exploded across the best-seller list, Harlequin released some B.D.S.M.
Its Web site notes that the Harlequin Blaze series-its “sexiest” imprint-is “not erotica.” (“While our books are very sensual, they deliver on the Harlequin promise of one hero, one heroine and an implied committed relationship at the end.”) Still, Harlequin has tried to adapt to the rise in e-books and to the interest in more hardcore material. Harlequins can get racy, but they retain something of their genteel British roots. By 2010, romance novels were the fastest-growing part of the e-book market Julie Bosman, of the Times, wrote that readers were trading “the racy covers of romance novels for the discretion of digital books.” When Fabio-the Great Blond One-arrived on the scene, he was a natural fit.īut a year after Fabio’s “Top Model” cameo, Amazon released the first Kindle e-reading device.
#Harlequin romance novels of the 90s full#
Joe McAleer, a historian who has written about Harlequin, told me that Harlequin romances have traditionally followed a formula: “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl on page 56, and, by page 180, the book would end with a marriage proposal.” By the seventies, Harlequins became known for their lush language, which often evoked settings that sounded like Thomas Kinkade paintings: “The rolling tide of summer grass had engulfed the small meadow in a sweet-smelling flood of lambs’ tails, coltsfoot, feverfew, the drifting pollen from them like pale yellow dust on Linden’s bare arms as she lay full length among them,” Charlotte Lamb begins in “Temptation,” published in 1979. Harlequin will become a division of News Corp.’s HarperCollins Publishers. Last week, News Corporation announced it would acquire Harlequin from its parent company, Torstar Corporation, for about four hundred and fifteen million dollars-not much more than Harlequin’s revenue last year. But, for the past several years, Harlequin’s sales have declined as people have started getting their romance from erotic-and often self-published-e-books instead of grocery-store paperbacks. By 2012, romance novels were a 1.5-billion-dollar-a-year business that made up nearly seventeen per cent of fiction sales.
In 1972, Harlequin acquired Mills & Boon, and soon was synonymous with the romance novel. In the nineteen-fifties, Harlequin started reprinting titles from Mills & Boon, a British publisher of popular romance novels. Harlequin Books Limited-now Harlequin Enterprises-was founded in 1949 in Canada as a small printer, packager, and distributor of books. Fabio was at least twice the age of the season’s oldest contestant and watching the young girls feign (at best) enthusiasm and (at worst) horniness throughout the shoot was close to unbearable.” Madeleine Davies later recalled on Jezebel, “If you saw it you’d definitely recall seeing as it might have been one of the grimmest things to have ever appeared on television. By then, Fabio had faded, as had the brand with which he had long been identified. In 2006, Fabio, his long mane still blond, guest-starred on the reality show “America’s Next Top Model,” posing with the contestants in a photo shoot for fake Harlequin covers. Our favorite featured an improbably Scottish Fabio who spoke in a brogue-we knew what was under his kilt. When I was in high school, my friends and I used to hunt down these Harlequins from used-book stores.
In the eighties and nineties, the model Fabio Lanzoni popularized “the clinch”-the image on Harlequin paperback covers of a muscled man clutching an enraptured woman against his bare pecs.