Dawn Calleja, Report on Business magazine editor.Daniel Ehrenworth/The Globe and Mail
You’re probably wondering about this month’s cover, which is, to say the least, a departure from our typical fare. But once you’ve read “The swoon boom,” you’ll see we had no other option.
As Deborah Aarts teases out in delightful detail, a renaissance in romance is revving up the book business, especially in Canada. Yes, the Great Hot North has spawned some of the world’s biggest names in love lit, including Carley Fortune and Rachel Reid, whose spicy gay hockey series has swept tens of millions of fans right off their skates. And the knock-on effects are bolstering publishers, booksellers and, of course, the writers themselves (not to mention making readers hungry for happily-ever-afters weak at the knees).
A key player in Romancelandia is Harlequin, based right here in Toronto. Harlequin built its empire of swoon on distinctive art that encouraged readers—left them no other choice but, really—to judge a book by its cover.
I was nine or so when I picked up my first Harlequin. It was summertime. We were up north and TV-less, and age-appropriate books simply weren’t available. So I delved into our cottage’s small collection of musty paperbacks, with titles like A Silken Barbarian and Devil in Disguise, their covers featuring gauzy oil paintings or almost comically retouched photographs of dark-haired beauties and ripple-abbed rakes.
I instantly fell in love with their comforting predictability. On page one, you knew exactly who would end up together on page 192, and you knew exactly how the story would end: happily.
As I got older, I set aside romance in favour of Capital-L Literature, which is meant to make you weep not with hope but with despair. The self-imposed joy hiatus lasted decades. Then COVID-19 hit and I, like millions of other locked-down readers the world over, started hankering for an escape from the terrors of real life.
Joanne Klimaszewski/The Globe and Mail
And so we come to this month’s cover. We knew we wanted to capture the same ravishment vibes as the Harlequins that provided a gateway into the genre for so many readers, and there was no one better suited to doing so than Joanne Klimaszewski. Since 2013, she’s been shooting eight windblown covers a month for Harlequin Presents, a line that promises to sweep readers “into a world of luxury, wealth and exotic locations.”
Many of Klimaszewski’s covers feature Jesse Dunphy, who has posed for 1,100 Harlequins since 2010. Cowboys, firefighters, pirates, chief execs—you name it, he’s donned the costume. Dunphy came out of Harlequin semi-retirement to pose with relative newcomer Jessica Bleta for this month’s cheeky cover (which even features a loon — iykyk).
The cover game is changing, though. Illustration is sweeping the genre, in part due to lower costs. And even Harlequin has started to use stock imagery for certain lines. So far, though, the company has stood steadfastly against using artificial intelligence to create its hunk-and-belle covers. Die-hard readers, says Klimaszewski, want to know that even if their fantasy stories are made up, the people on the cover are somewhere out there in real life.