Friday News Regency Romance, GRNW Meet-Up, “mistreating” books, and clever music + movie mashup
Publishing NewsGeorgette Heyer / historical romance / Jane Austen / LGBT Romance / paper books / Regency Period / video12 Comments
The Regency Romance: How Jane Austen (Kinda) Created a New Subgenre – Consensus on Twitter last night, where this article was circulating, is that the title is AWFUL, especially given the fact that the article itself makes the crucially important points that Austen was writing books about her own society and that “it took Georgette Heyer to turn the Regency the period into the Regency the subgenre.” Overall a pretty good article on the evolution of the Regency Romance. I was especially happy to see the myth of Heyer’s Historical Purity unwound:
But even though it’s built with a deep understanding of the period, Heyer’s is still a highly artificial clockwork world, like some eighteenth-century mechanical cabinet curiosity. And she isn’t evoking the Regency purely for the sake of evoking the Regency. Rather, she’s created a highly fanciful backdrop that shows off her characters to maximum advantage. . .
With fame came imitators. Publishing hasn’t changed that dramatically in the last several decades—there’s always somebody chasing success. Heyer was particularly infuriated by Hazard of Hearts, the first historical romance written by Barbara Cartland—Princess Diana’s step-grandmother and noted wearer of outrageous hats. The overlap in names with Heyer’s Friday’s Child are pretty striking: Sir Montagu Revesby and Sir Montagu Reversby, Hero Wantage and Harriet Wantage, Viscount Sheringham and Viscount Sherringham. Heyer wrote:
“Strange that Miss Cartland, so well-informed on such details as the most fashionable color for breeches, and one of the most fashionable tailors of the day, should fall down on the ABC of Regency dress. Hessians were worn with pantaloons, never with breeches.”–Jezebel
Announcing GRNW 2015 Panels and other news! -The 2015 Gay Romance Northwest Meet-Up will be held on September 26th at the Seattle Public Library. According to the website, panels will include “the changing dynamics in lesbian romance, elevating underrepresented characters, hearing harrowing research stories,” and other topics. The agenda can be found here.
GRNW BookFest – Bigger and Better and still FREE!
Once again, GRNW is taking over the Hotel Monaco after the conference for the GRNW 2015 Book Fest, featuring 50 LGBTQ romance authors, tons of swag, free apps, a tasty cash bar, tables with lots of books and freebies from your favorite publishers Bold Strokes Books, Dreamspinner Press, Wilde City Press, and Riptide Publishing!
We hope you can join us at the main event at the Seattle Public Library on September 26, but just in case that’s not in the cards, come join us that evening, 4pm – 6pm, at the Hotel Monaco for the book fest. It will be a blast! –GRNW
You Don’t Have To Destroy A Book To Love It: A Plea To Readers -Maybe just because I’m a reader who loves to dog-ear pages (I use the Kindle bookmark thing many, many times for any given book), make notes in the margins, highlight passages, and carry my books around with me (virtually) everywhere, I have a hard time generating a lot of sympathy with Claire Fallon’s position that a pristine book is better loved. On the other hand, I do appreciate it when a rare or even jus used book I’ve found isn’t dog-eared to nothingness, so, maybe there’s a little double standard there.
. . . A book is happier handled gently and slotted neatly next to its friends than bent, falling apart, and shoved onto an over-jammed shelf.
Even if you don’t believe objects have feelings, it’s hard to deny this. Pretending that your objects have feelings, treating them as if they do, can be beneficial. You take better care of your possessions, appreciate the happiness they bring you.
When it comes to books, I’ve always on some level believed this. Books act almost as living, feeling beings in my life, so why abuse them? Most of my books are nearly immaculate, spines unbroken and pages free of dog-ears. Among this collection, the beaten-up novels and philosophy tracts I bought secondhand for college courses stand out. And I have to admit, seeing their loose covers and scuffed corners on my bookcase brings me something less than unalloyed joy. –Huffington Post
The cast of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox covers Blackalicious’ “The Blowup” – Even if you haven’t actually seen Fantastic Mr. Fox, this video mashup is catchy and clever as hell (it’s a great movie, though). –AV Club
I wonder if Diana Killian will be going to GRNW?
I’m naturally a gentle reader and prefer it when my paperbacks don’t look like I’ve read them a zillion times, until I’ve actually read them that often. I never dogear and the only book I’ve ever written in had a printing error that left a couple of paragraphs out of order. And I will no longer lend paperbacks to my mother, because I found the condition she leaves the spines in kinda depressing and she has no idea how she does that, so really can’t not mess up my books.
Despite all of that, I don’t think my books are better loved for it. It’s just how I was raised to treat books, combined with however I seem to hold books while reading. Unless it’s a library book or stock in a store, I don’t care how anyone else treats books.
I didn’t bother reading the article, but I suspect my piles of books, double stacked shelves, clearly carried around paperbacks (but with pristine spines!), and my ability to lose dust jackets would make the author cringe.
I have many entities in my life that actually do have feelings and require that I make the effort to be kind and respectful–like, you know, human beings, the cat… My books will have to accept being treated as inanimate objects.
Re books: Nope. Can’t do it. Can’t dog-ear the page, crease the spine, trash the cover or write in them anywhere. Won’t even lick my fingers to turn the pages. Feels like sacrilege. But—this may be why I like reading e-books so much, where I feel free to underline, bookmark and take notes like crazy.
Claire Fallon has obviously never read The Velveteen Rabbit.
A Hazard of Hearts may well have infuriated Georgette Heyer, but the characters listed were from A Duels of Hearts, not A Hazard of Hearts. Even more infuriating would have been Love Me Forever by Barbara Cartland which had a very similar plot to Heyer’s These Old Shades.
That lecture on how to handle books rubbed me the wrong way. I will admit that my grandmother’s insistence on how to handle books, inherited, no doubt from her father means that I’ve inherited many of my great grandfather’s books and they’re in good shape — but they were also leather-bound with gold embossing.
Plenty of the paperbacks I’ve owned and treated well are falling to bits. They weren’t made to last; they were meant to be read and discarded.
I’m very careful with books, but mostly because I grew up reading library books and you really are not allowed to trash those. I was sitting next to someone on a plane last year and she had a brand new paperback so completely folded back that it had broken the binding. On day one. I was sick to my stomach.
But on the other hand, I’m a huge fan of the words within the book, not the binding. I don’t really care about first editions and collector’s editions, I just want a good story.
Contradictions. I haz them.
But if you have nearly broken a book in half on the first read, you might not even be able to reread. If it sucked but is in decent condition, then donate it to your local friends of the library, which will sell it to raise money for the library.
I’m generally pretty careful with my own books, but I also loan them to people and don’t really care if they break the spines or otherwise muck them up. I did drop a friend’s hardcover Wheel of Time (back when it was first starting out) in the tub once, and I uh, replaced it hoping they wouldn’t notice. Since then, no hardcovers in the tub, although I’ve dropped a couple of paperbacks since.
On the other hand, the books that really mean a lot to me eventually develop breaks in the spine at favourite passages and their covers get rubbed… those are the ones I get signed, if I can, because it’s honestly kind of delightful to show an author a book they wrote 20 years ago and how well-loved it’s been. I have 30 seconds during a signing to say hello and thank you and your books touched me, and sometimes just handing them that yellowing-paged paperback is all of that in one moment. That or it makes them feel old, but sometimes it’s fun to tease, too. ;)
I don’t get very many physical books these days, unless they’re loans from friends or intend to be put into the loan circulation, but they’re just as lovely to me in pristine condition as they are battered and well-read.
Also also also, so yes to Velveteen Rabbit. If some of my books have character, it’s just because they’re Real.
I’m definitely anal about how I treat my books. One of the reasons I was so happy about the advent of e-readers is that I hated carrying around a book in my backpack on my commutes, only to have the cover get inevitably mangled by whatever else I was also carrying. An e-reader in a protective cover is way more likely to survive my commute. :)
@Lindsay:
Yes, some of my books have been loved to real. The ones I kept in my bed while I had pneumonia or the flu, they’ve got mangle marks from me falling asleep and crumpling then up, probably some of those stains are snot or drool rather than chicken broth. And we probably don’t even want to talk about what happened to the ones I took with me when I was in the hospital.
Those marks are signs of the life I’ve lived WITH those books, and I treasure them, even though I no longer ever read paper books.
I used to say there is nothing more loved than a beat-up, marked-on, highlighted, dogeared hardback book. I have many of these. However, lately I have acquired a few BEAUTIFUL books that are meant to be *gasp* READ, not kept on a coffee table where they belong because they’re so beautiful.
I can’t bring myself to touch them, much less read them. I love pretty things and these books are GORGEOUS. (Fortunately, one of them really is an art book.) They AREN’T just words on the page. The book designers are artists too and I feel a need to respect the physical art the way I would respect a painting I bought to hang on my wall and look at.
Then again, I know a lot of people who are outraged that there are artists who take old books and make new art out of them. I would be upset if someone did that to MY beloved books, but I’m glad they’re making new beautiful things. It would make me happy to see someone make a new beautiful thing out of a title I own, just not MY copy.