Spring is in the air - or maybe it's just in my step - with the scent of love wafting back from this coming fertility season all the way from Great Britain and the latest personal ads in the London Review of Books.We provide these as a public service to warm and gladden hearts during this bitter cold snap in the U.S.As always, response box numbers have been deleted to protect the innocently guilty or guiltily innocent.As for you, you're an adult and don't need your hand held - unless for long, slow, candle-lit walks backward on the beach at...
Love In Bloomsbury: Our Monthly Look at the London Review of Books Personal Ads
Though another page has torn off the calendar and the autumn leaves are falling, love is still in bloom, and, as usual, the personal ads at the London Review of Books are fecund with possibilities for casual or meaningful fecunding and the pursuit of happiness or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Contact info has been deleted to protect the delightfully guilty:My attempts to find a suitable lover in this column would have been far more successful but for the bureaucratic pettifoggery of the LRB advertising department, the dilatory shenanigans of the British postal service, and the rambunctiousness of my gall bladder....
London Review of Books Personal Ads, Redux: The Hits Just Keep On Comin’!
It’s September and, apparently, the season in Great Britain for love-lorn book lovers to sharpen their pencils and post some of the wittiest, most imaginative personal ads yet seen in a single issue of the London Review of Books:Without my grandfather’s contribution to agricultural reforms in 1912, this nation would currently have to import its turnips. While you think about that I shall remove my clothes. Man. 55.I have a dream. And that dream is to try on every pair of shoes in the world. That’s where you come in: brusque, butch fem cobbler to 55 with expansive collection of...
Miss Lonelybooks, Revisted
As one who has braved JDate, aka desperatehebrews.com, I know why the caged bird swings in hope. The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books provide opportunities for the bookish and alone to meet. But Americans and the British have completely different styles when it comes to personal ads. We Americans commodify and market ourselves with can-do! go-get ‘em! spirit that weighs heavily. We’re singing the lyrics from Best Foot Forward to the tune of Sinatra’s One For My Baby, One More For the Road, a torch song beneath the bright, snappy prose composed to wring...
"Have Books Destroyed Your Life, Too?"
(The following originally appeared in Fine Books & Collections magazine on March 20, 2009. I reprint it here at Book Patrol for your enjoyment, and to set up a sequel featuring more from the English-speaking world's lovelorn book lovers).We book folk are often socially inept or, if ept, we'd rather be reading: excepting the occasional clunker, a close relationship with books is very satisfying to the single/divorced and persnickety printslut.But even the most cerebrally occupied must bow to the will of the flesh and the desire for human company. Thus the appearance of personal ads in the New York Review...