a little romance

From: Cover Browser

I hope cover artist E. M. Jackson (The Saturday Evening Post, April 4, 1931) got some recognition, if not money, for this image when it was turned into the now iconic Harlequin logo.
     It is probably no coincidence that Jack Palmer, head of Canadian distribution for The Saturday Evening Post, was one of the founders of Harlequin Books in May of 1949.

"[August 15, 2013] Harlequin, the publisher with a name that is almost synonymous with romance novels, is releasing a host of new e-book originals through several of its imprints over the next several months, with plans to further increase this initiative. No date is set yet for the books to appear in print.

     'We’re thrilled to further expand our reach in the digital space,' Loriana Sacilotto, executive vice president of global editorial at Harlequin, told Publishers Weekly. 'In a retail environment that’s increasingly challenging for new and emerging authors, digital publication and promotion allows us to continue to encourage author discovery and growth, bring books to market more quickly, [and] leverage popular digital trends.'

From: FLY-BY-NIGHT

     The new program will include the launch of Harlequin-E, an imprint that will be devoted solely to works that are released first in digital format."
— Milly Driscoll, The Christion Science Monitor
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"[July 19, 2012] The relationship between novelists and romance-book publisher Harlequin Enterprises has soured over royalty fee contracts for electronic books.
     Three authors sued Toronto-based Harlequin Enterprises, the world’s largest publisher of romance novels, today in federal court in Manhattan, alleging the company has exploited a technicality in their contracts to pay them 21 percent less in royalties.
     At issue is whether Harlequin Enterprises, a unit of newspaper and book publisher Torstar Corp. (TS/B), is the publisher of the books, or whether it has licensed its Fribourg, Switzerland-based subsidiary, Harlequin Switzerland, to distribute the e-books, according to the complaint."
— Emily Grannis, Bloomberg Business Week
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Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011)

"'In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist,' Mr. Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair, for which he was a contributing editor.
     He took pains to emphasize that he had not revised his position on atheism, articulated in his best-selling 2007 book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, although he did express amused appreciation at the hope, among some concerned Christians, that he might undergo a late-life conversion.
     He also professed to have no regrets for a lifetime of heavy smoking and drinking. 'Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me,' he told Charlie Rose in a television interview in 2010, adding that it was 'impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle.'”
— William Grimes, The New York Times
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"Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer, and a troublemaker, and to those who knew him well, he was a gift from, dare I say it, God. He died today at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston, after a punishing battle with esophageal cancer, the same disease that killed his father.
     He was a man of insatiable appetites—for cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and, above all, for conversation. That he had an output to equal what he took in was the miracle in the man. You’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who could match the volume of exquisitely crafted columns, essays, articles, and books he produced over the past four decades. He wrote often—constantly, in fact, and right up to the end—and he wrote fast; frequently without the benefit of a second draft or even corrections. I can recall a lunch in 1991, when I was editing The New York Observer, and he and Aimée Bell, his longtime editor, and I got together for a quick bite at a restaurant on Madison, no longer there. Christopher’s copy was due early that afternoon. Pre-lunch canisters of scotch were followed by a couple of glasses of wine during the meal and a similar quantity of post-meal cognac. That was just his intake. After stumbling back to the office, we set him up at a rickety table and with an old Olivetti, and in a symphony of clacking he produced a 1,000-word column of near perfection in under half an hour."
— Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair
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Buy all of Christopher Hitchens' books here...

"It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stainedglass window." — Raymond Chandler

Los Angeles, 1949 (from: We Had Faces Then)

"Farewell, My Lovely was published in 1940 by Raymond Chandler, the virtual inventor of the hard-boiled private detective.  It’s the second novel he wrote, and features the iconic detective Philip Marlowe.  Marlowe is not a very nice person sometimes (and one wouldn’t expect him to be, given the kind of people he has to deal with) but he’s honest, and strong, and brave to the point of foolishness.  That’s what we want in a private eye, anyway, right?
     [...] Even though Chandler finally pieces the puzzle together in a highly satisfactory way, one doesn’t read him merely for the story itself. His method of storytelling, along with his turns of phrase and imagery are as equally compelling as the plot itself."— TIME ENOUGH AT LAST
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For a history of Los Angeles (and California), check out this series by Kevin Starr: Americans and the California Dream, which includes the previously published Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915, and Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era. The next installment is The Dream Endures: California through the Great Depression. From Oxford University Press

Get books by Raymond Chandler and Kevin Starr here...