Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
There may be a lot of romance out there, but it all seems relatively recent. I'd like to find the older romantic suspense, but other than a handful of titles from Victoria Holt, Phyllis A. Whitney, and Mary Stewart, there doesn't seem to be anything available. I'm thinking of Velda Johnston, Jane Aiken Hodge, Dorothy Eden, Anne Maybury, Elsie Lee, Willo Davis Roberts, etc. These were kinds of paperbacks that had covers with a mansion in the background, a single light shining in a window, and a woman fleeing in the foreground. Fun stuff that sadly seems to have just disappeared.
|
That may be starting, though, as the ebook reading population increases. I've seen a bunch of Victoria Holt, Phyllis Whitney and the non-Arthurian Mary Stewart available recently, and I hadn't seen their books around in ebook format before. I'm not really into the traditional Gothic romance genre anymore, and I have the sneaking suspicion that if I read some of those books again now I wouldn't get the same enjoyment from them.
For some of those authors, though, unless there are hardcovers around, the age of the paperbacks is probably maxing out and it really depends on how many people kept those books. I probably have a bunch of them in my storage unit but there's no way I would take apart those books to scan them. I can lay my hands on Elsie Lee's "The Nabob's Widow" (absolutely love that book) because that's one that I periodically re-read, but I just checked on Amazon, and the used price runs from $39.99 to $100. So even if I had a working scanner (I don't) and was willing to take apart the book to scan it (I'm not), the value of the book would prevent me from doing so. Just checked the price on a Grace Ingram hardcover that I bought years ago for a twenty-five cents as a ex-library book - it's worth $140+ now.
Got to wonder what the rest of those "trashy" novels are worth now.
