The Merchants of Venus: Inside of Harlequin and the Empire of Romance

Duncan McDowall is a professor of history at Carleton University and the
author of Quick to the Frontier: Canada’s Royal Bank.

In these days of global competitiveness and the bottom line, there is
little to sneer about in the success of the Harlequin romance
“empire.” Each year, the Toronto-based Harlequin Enterprises sells
176 million books in 23 languages in more than 100 national markets. It
is the unflagging profit workhorse of the Torstar group. Bombardier may
sell the Global Express, but Harlequin sells the global romance.

The romance novel genre was English in origin. In the wake of World War
I, English publisher Mills and Boon realized that books could be made
into branded commodities that the public would soon come to rely on. As
with any branded product, the quality was assured and the satisfaction
of consumption guaranteed. Just after World War II, a printing house
owned by the Bonnycastle family of Winnipeg took up romance novels as an
add-on to their mainstream printing. The Manatee: Strange Loves of a
Seaman by Nancy Bruff was the 1949 prototype. West Coast writer Paul
Grescoe picks up the story of Harlequin and carries it, with much the
same sense of latent anticipation provided by a
nurse-lures-handsome-young-doctor story, to its heady climax in the
1990s, by which time Harlequins have global brand recognition from Japan
to Slovakia. They have become the Coca-Cola of reading.

Grescoe tells a lively and well-researched tale. He highlights the
crucial turning points: the hiring of market-smart executives from
Procter & Gamble (who treated the selling of books like the pushing of
soap and toothpaste), the acquisitions of crucial competitors like Mills
and Boon, and the aggressive internationalization of the product. At
times there is a certain awkwardness in Grescoe’s structure, reflected
in abrupt shifts of focus, and the book’s copyediting is poor.
Nonetheless, he does work in fascinating sections on Harlequin’s
well-disciplined stable of writers; about its editors, who apply the
formulaic approach to writing; and about the demographics of its almost
entirely female readership (the average Harlequin reader is in her early
forties, married, well-housed, and well-educated). Grescoe also has a
knack for vignettes that capture the essence of the story: for example,
when Harlequin president David Galloway told a skeptical audience of
Toronto MBAs that Harlequin readers have better sex lives, one
businessman in the audience piped up “How many books does it take?”
The Merchants of Venus is thus not just a business success story, but
also a mirror of our society and its needs; as such, it will interest
feminists, students of literature, and sociologists.