These romance novels—collectively known in their era as “junior novels” and now known as “malt shop books”—were published from the 1940s through the early 1960s, and were the books read by teen girls of the time (aside from Gone with the Wind, of course). Writing in 1956, librarian Emma L. Patterson observed their popularity, noting that “the growth of the junior novel appears to be one of the most amazing phenomena of the book world. Twenty-five years ago it had no existence as such. Today no young people’s librarian could stock her shelves without it” (381). By the early 1990s, when I was reading these books as discarded library copies, those original girl readers were pensioners, librarians stocked their YA shelves with very different texts, and the entire junior novel genre had been virtually forgotten.