It was an appropriate landing spot: Both the publishing company and the Strip trade on decadent fantasy. The exhibit - a mix of dozens of book covers and detailed paintings - ended up in Sin City after a stint at a New York gallery. “These works were part of a larger zeitgeist.” Because Harlequin markets the books to such a large audience, “they had to have their pulse on women’s desires.”
![that blond male model on harlequin romance novels that blond male model on harlequin romance novels](https://i.harperapps.com/hqna/covers/9781335404220/y404.jpg)
“I don’t think anybody sat back and thought it out,” Semmelhack said.
![that blond male model on harlequin romance novels that blond male model on harlequin romance novels](https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_scale,f_auto,fl_progressive,pg_1,q_80,w_800/kpbyvyjlib2xhczod6iu.jpg)
Their paramours were relegated to the background, if they appeared at all. In the mid-'60s, Harlequin covers shifted to tight portraits of resolute-looking women. The second wave of feminism, with its focus on workplace equality and reproductive rights, was still years from peaking. And the heroines it depicted lived out female professional - not necessarily sexual - fantasies long before they became reality.įor example, the covers of doctor-nurse romances of the ‘50s and ‘60s showed workplace lovers chatting as equals, which might be linked (as another placard tells us) to the frustration of women who “felt sequestered in the domestic realm of postwar suburbia.” In exotic-locale tales of about the same period, women were the doctors, though only in foreign and often tropical destinations.
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She came to two conclusions: The artwork, which had the richness of movie stills, was of higher-than-expected caliber.
![that blond male model on harlequin romance novels that blond male model on harlequin romance novels](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/11/24/22/464FE0B200000578-5078925-image-a-72_1511562413288.jpg)
Her job: to judge the books solely by their covers. Semmelhack, who was no reader of romances, pored over a trove of original Harlequin paintings.