Confession: I fell in love with clinch covers long before I read romances. I treated them like art before I started reading the stories behind them and exploring the romance genre more seriously.
There’s that old saying, “Never judge a book by its cover.” But I did—sometimes solely on it, for better or worse—because I loved the promise of wanton joyful hedonism a classic clinch can offer. So I collected the most outrageous bodice rippers and pulp books and proudly displayed them on my writing desk and bookshelves. I still do, although the professor in me now leads with the disclaimer “loving the covers does not mean an endorsement of all of the content.”
This is especially true for the classic bodice ripper out of which the clinch cover was born.
I mean I do endorse some of the content: sweeping romances, joyful sex scenes, women busting out of their bodices from the sheer tensions of sexual desire, men in tight pants with opens shirts melting of them because of the heat of their passion, flowery language for all the sexybits. It’s fun. It’s joyful. It’s over-the-top stories that center our emotional and sexual lives. Yay! But I don’t endorse all of the content: rape, violence against women, the terribly racist “sexy Indian romances,” for example, not to mention all the toxic -isms Georgette Heyer’s legacy brings to the genre.
So, yeah, these stories have their problems and many of them don’t age well. But so often the entire romance genre is associated with two things: clinch covers and Fabio, perhaps the most famous clinch cover model. Now many a romance reader will tell you it’s not all bodice rippers and I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Butter actors, but the collective unconscious has made it so that the genre can’t escape the association with these two images. I’m not mad about it. I think it’s part of the fun of the genre and I frankly loath the new trend of sanitizing genre book covers—this is happening in romance, horror, sci-fi, and fantasy—to appeal to a wider audience.
I’m still collecting clinch and pulp covers, the more over-the-top the better. And thanks to Jennifer at The Art of the Clinch, I now have a better sense of the history of clinch cover art, its significance to the romance genre, and how to go about adding to my collection.
It’s a fascinating exploration of a style of cover that was selling a new type of book, the bodice ripper, and with it, a gateway into more sexually explicit historical romances that originally centered on women’s lives, emotions, and pleasure. Check out the fantastic video and prepare to get swept away…
There will be flowers. There will be clothes melting off bodies. There will be strategically placed swords and steamy gazes. Also naked Fabio. Enjoy!
Guest Contributor Bio
Jennifer, a vintage clinch cover enthusiast and general lover of all things literary and artistic, is a writer, bibliophile, and librarian living in a renovated 1875 farmhouse in central upstate New York. As a life-long resident of the state, she's fascinated by its cultural and material history in rural and small-town life and the way vitality in these areas has ebbed and flowed over the past 300 years. You can often find her exploring forgotten back roads, wandering old cemeteries, and perusing thrift stores, where she finds many cast-off treasures, including clinch covers.
The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.
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