Usually historical guidelines and limitations are only for the exterior.( In Chicago they are limited to the exterior visible from the street.) So you can pretty much do whatever you want elsewhere.

Yeah, because governments and municipalities never bend over backwards for rich people or to fill their own pockets.

Yes; my mother’s heart disease was misdiagnosed by a woman doctor. Women doctors can absorb the systemic misogyny that we all live in.

Yeah, that’s no weirdly 70's fireplace. That’s going to be a late 1800's-early 1900's Arts and Crafts movement ceramic studio piece (or at least the central tile frieze of a ship at sale is, not sure about the rest of the surround). A la Rookwood or other American studios making ceramic tiles, ceramic housewares, and…

I dunno, if you had a marriage that didn’t outlast your britta filter and it was over a decade ago, I think it’s weird to have any feelings at all about the situation.

You don’t really need to approve or disapprove, you only need to shut up. 

Disclaimer: I wouldn’t consider myself a romance reader, so I’m not speaking from a place of great knowledge.

Indeed; let’s not confuse quality with genre; just because a title is romance, or science fiction or mystery, doesn’t mean it isn’t well written. There are reams of really good authors; Mary Balogh, the late Jo Beverley, Loretta Chase, Joanna Bourne, Liz Carlyle, to name just a few, and those are only the…

Thank you for saying this Dr. Mrs The Monarch. Romance was the genre that made me love reading as a young teenager. My Mom made fun of me for it and I ended up saving my babysitting money and hiding the books I was buying. But I developed a noticeably large vocabulary that my friends and family noticed. Little did she…

I hear ya on both counts. I’ve been tired for forty years of people maligning an entire “women’s” genre (I mentioned in another thread that my grandfather read them too). And publishers often have no actual consideration for the value of books.  This is true of academic presses as well as of popular presses. 

There’s also the problem of marketing new authors, or re-marketing older books—often the covers are really out of sync with the books, because the company doesn’t have a handle on how to sell the author yet/the author hasn’t proven to be worth a lot of attention.

A perfect Valentine’s treat. These covers are awesome!

Oh man, The Flame and the Flower & Shanna by Kathleen Woodiwiss and Sweet Savage Love by Rosemary Rogers were literally my gateway drugs to my lifelong addiction to romance novels. I always loved those completely lurid covers and had no problem with displaying my book while reading. I think I got a kick out of…

What about the least twenty years of covers? Non-category romance covers don’t look anything like they did in the Fabio era. If anything, traditional publishers are still putting out 50SoG style covers (though that is waning).

Yea and no. There aren’t covers that look like these anymore, not for non-category books. There are still little of embracing couples and half-naked dudes, but the popular design style is more minimalist.

That’s because they’re too busy judging the women who read romances.

On IG, @bawdybookmarks makes wonderful bookmarks out of these kinds of old romance novel covers.  I love them!

that’s fucking beautiful.

Uh... Bloomberg, Payne, Smith, Hemmler, and the rest of the folks who run Fox News, along with many of the older white male anchors are boomers.

Unfortunately, I think you may be right about the lithium batteries (and let me explain my unfortunately).