There isn't a vast amount about romance in this book, but it does mention that:
Librarians' attitudes toward popular fiction continued to shift from quiet hostility to tempered acceptance. A favorite bumper sticker intended to humanize their image in the 1970s read "Librarians Are Novel Lovers" - a message that might have offended some a generation earlier. But shifts did occur. When a new director took over at the Roanoke (Indiana) Public Library in 1979, she moved novels by Jacqueline Susann, Philip Roth, Vladimir Nabokov, and others - marked "X" if they used the words "hell" or "damn" - from the closed to the open shelf. "Funny thing is, soon as I did that, the books stopped circulating." On the other hand, she was highly irritated with "those darn Harlequin romances." Patrons "march in, check out 10 of them, and come back in the next week for 10 more." But the New York Public Library's Fort Washington branch considered itself "very fortunate to have someone ... who brings in a shopping cart full of light romances every three or four months [to donate to the library]. This has kept our readers happy and has helped stretch our budget." (216-217)
and in the 1990s
many librarians began to openly advocate for commonplace reading. Give 'Em What They Want! read the title of a 1992 book authored by a Baltimore County Public Library (BCPL) committee and published by the ALA. "We are always somewhat bemused by librarians who underestimate, or at least misjudge, the tastes of the public they serve," wrote Director Charles W. Robinson in the preface. "Our users are very often quite different from the kind of people who become librarians, and placing value judgments on other people's interests and reading is certainly a violation of the intellectual freedom which librarians profess to hold so dear."
Case in point - romances. At the Westville (Illinois) Public Library, romances constituted nearly half the library's 8,268 volumes, most donated by a local reader who brought in complete monthly lines after she finished them, the librarian said. Because the Dewey Decimal Classification ignored romance fiction, readers devised their own organization - "romances are shelved by publisher and author, and cross-indexed by publication date. Lists categorize the books according to trends and degree of sexual content." Within the Lincoln Trail Library System, Westville became the interlibrary loan source for romances. "Statistics ranked Westville very high in terms of circulation and community use among libraries," noted an official. The collection "might be the subject of derision, but in fact it has helped bolster the general collection."
Across the country, patron demand for romances exercised similar pressures on public library collections. In 1981, romances accounted for 45 percent of all paperbacks sold. A decade later publishers were issuing 150 romance titles per month to 45 million readers, as annual sales approached $1 billion. Increasingly, however, women pushed back against the kind of romance novel bashing that dated back to the early nineteenth century. When an Omaha World-Herald columnist questioned the value of romances in 1996, for example, readers fired back. "I love romance because I can relate to the heroines, unlike the images portrayed by women's magazines or most movies," said one. Said another "Romance is empowering and uplifting. ... It makes us like women and expect more from men. Oops, maybe I've hit on a reason it's so maligned." "By far the better question," said a third, "is Why alone among all readers of commercial fiction, are those who read romances constantly challenged by such as you to defend their preference?"
"Librarians have historically been a tough sell for romances, often relegating the well-worn 'silly' paperbacks, uncataloged, to a free-standing rack or donation shelf'" a Chicago Tribune reporter wrote in 1998. "But buyers of library fiction have been forced to submit to the public's lust for romance." Many libraries increased purchases of romances, some sponsored romance book clubs, and the library press "now routinely features the once-snubbed genre." Said one librarian, "We've changed our tune. ... We used to feel that [romance readers] were sheltered housewives, but we find that many businesswomen read them, and every kind of person, from grandmothers to young mothers." (228-230)
and there are a couple of other places where romances are mentioned, more briefly.
There isn't a vast amount about romance in this book, but it does mention that:
and in the 1990s
and there are a couple of other places where romances are mentioned, more briefly.