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.

Harlequin romance novels pdf