We’ve all seen them somewhere: in Barnes & Noble, at the grocery store or CVS, or at least on the internet. Pocket-sized Mass Market (and now Mass Max) paperbacks with varying spine colors and covers that once upon a time kinda looked exactly the same. They are the one thing many people who don’t know much about romance invoke when they think about the genre, and the company behind them has been going on strong for more decades than most of us have been alive. They are Harlequin Category Romances, and they are legion.
Harlequin began as a packaging company in 1949, but really began the romance thing in the late 1950s when they purchased American distribution rights to Mills & Boon, a British company publishing romance and other things. Over the next couple of decades, they started publishing romances of their own. By 1980, their romance lines brought in the majority of their revenue, and well, you’ve seen what they look like now. Of course, they’ve also made some unfortunate decisions over the years; they ended their Kimani line, which was dedicated specifically to Black romance (though they did start filtering their Black authors out to the themed lines). They also closed their longstanding Desire line, feedi...
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