It’s time for the Ads & Features of the October 1988 (!!) issue of Romantic Times Magazine.

Y’all. We’ve got:

• Vintage gossip!
• Blind items that are very easy to guess!
• Danielle Steel’s two blue Mercedes!
• Fuchsia covers with giant flowers and startled animals!
• Riverboat gambler romance heroes!
• And a truly paltry obituary for an extraordinary author.

It’s 1988. Fuchsia. So much fuchsia.

Blanket content warning for romances written in the late 80s. Be ready for some very offensive tropes.

Do not, and I mean this most sincerely, skip the visual aids. It’s 1988 y’all. The covers are glorious! 

LINKS. So many good links!

• “Double Trouble: One or Two Women?” by Gillian Whitlock about the alleged plagiarism of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s The Blue Castle by Australian author Colleen McCullough.
• Sam Lord’s Castle, Barbados
• Sharon Spiak Art listing for Wary Hearts
• Eye Heart Romance’s review for Mistress of the Seas by Ruth Langan
• Clothes in Books: “Mary Burchell aka Ida Cook” – the patterns from Mab’s Fashions!
• Mary Burchell’s Wikipedia page
• A BluSky thread from John Bull on Mary Burchell
• The Pudding magazine interactive article about romance covers by Jan Diehm and Sandra Chiu

music: purple-planet.com

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