Deborah Cooke: Author

There was an article in the paper the other day about Dame Barbara Cartland, who passed away a few years ago. It was about the republication of her etiquette guide, although she’s better known for her romance novels.

I’ve never actually read one of her books – most of which were Regency romances – but she was the personification of what most people seem to expect romance authors to be. When people say to me “You don’t look like a romance writer”, I know that Dame Barbara’s ghost is hovering in the corner. She wore pink, had a number of small dogs, wore a lot of make-up and had more than a passing familiarity with feather boas. She reportedly reclined on a chaise lounge each day to dictate her current book in progress to her secretary, eating chocolate bonbons as she did so. I’m not sure that she revised or rewrote any of what she dictated, although I forget how quickly she dictated a book. It was something crazy, like one every two weeks. They were sweet historicals – no sex – possibly around 50,000 words in length.

And she published 700 books.

Seven hundred.

There are reputedly 100 million copies of her books in print. That’s a whole lot of books. The reporter wondered where those books had gone and I have to admit that I’m wondering, too. How do that many books disappear?

Where did they go?

Have you ever seen Barbara Cartland’s books in garage sales? Thrift shops? Used book stores? Any kind of bookstore? I can’t recall actually seeing any of them for sale anywhere.

I checked AbeBooks.com and their search engine found 18,195 copies of Dame Barbara’s books among their vendors. That leaves 99,981,805 books still unaccounted for.

Are they all in your keeper stash? Your TBR pile?

Let’s go Cartland-book-spotting. Tell me where you’ve seen them, in the past or currently. I’m curious.