Curse you, Manatee!!

Boy, I bet you’re wondering what THAT headline is about.

Everybody has addictions of one form or another.  Some people smoke.  Some people drink.  Some people play World of Warcraft and subside on a diet of Mountain Dew and Funyuns.

My mother’s addiction – paperback romance novels.

You’ve seen them before, haven’t you?  They usually have some steamy front cover artwork with some girl passionately leaning against some muscular dude’s hairless chest – yes, I know that’s how Fabio became famous – and the contents are the kind of publishing pabulum that kills brain cells faster than inhaling airplane glue.

But my mother loved them.  She read them voraciously, and she had bookshelves and bookshelves of them – Harlequin Romance novels and Barbara Cartland love novels…  I tried reading one once.  Awful.  Definitely NOT my cup of decaf.

She used to buy them at the bookstores, at the drugstores, and at one point she joined a subscription service so that every month a new box of these – for lack of a better word – books – arrived at our doorstep.

I tell this story as background for another story.

Last Saturday, I’m at the Washington County Fairgrounds, as the Fairgrounds are hosting a flea market and antique show.  There were a few things here and there, I did pick up some ephemera from the Madison Theater, and I was about to leave when –

There it was.  A book with an extremely lurid front cover.

The Manatee, a novel by Nancy Bruff.

Look at this artwork.  Look at the tagline for the book.  “He had a passion for his ship’s figurehead no living,  breathing woman could satisfy!” This absolutely SCREAMED “Caption Time.”  And it only cost a dollar… so yeah, I spent the dollar.

I had to figure out how to censor the artwork so as to not offend the genteel readers of the Times Union’s blog universe.  Yes, in case you’re wondering, that bow sculpture’s hair does not completely cover her bosom.  That’s right, I said bosom.  It’s an old book, I used an old colloquialism.

Luckily, the TU’s blogging software allows the importation of GIF files, so I scanned the book cover and then put a nice big horizontal bar in a very strategic location, and then digitally converted the file to GIF.

Supposedly there were a quarter of a million copies of this book in print.  That’s not Harry Potter level, but it’s pretty substantial nonetheless.  But I knew nothing about this book.

The back cover’s advertising blurb wasn’t much help.

THE MANATEE, a lusty, passion-packed saga of Nantucket whaling days, hit the reading public with the impact of a Hemingway novel.  It sold over a quarter-million copies.  It was a book club selection.  It was translated into seven foreign languages.

Filled with sin and violence, THE MANATEE is a bold, sweeping drama of unbridled love and hate.  It tells the story of Jabez Folger, a savage, romantic man of the sea, with a sinister secret in his past and dark desires in his heart.  How his vindictive curelty brings about his ruin, how he is finally freed from the evil demon that possesses his soul, makes THE MANATEE a classic tragedy of gods and devils played out against a setting of sea, sky and fabulous island!

Yeah.  Right.  That’s no help.

The inside pages added something else to the mix.

It was on his first whaling voyage, at 15, that Jabez Folger had a dark and terrible experience so evil that it warped his entire life.  It led to the rapine outburst which perverted his young bride’s love.  It led to his passionate affair with their South Sea island servant girl.  And it was responsible for the strange and horrible events which appened aboard his ill-fated ship.

THE MANATEE abounds with unforgettable characters – the frustrated Quaker wife Piety, the warm and lovely half-caste Shrine, the obscenely wise old sea dog Amos, the wickedly curious Aunt Keziah, the intriguing nymphomaniac Yvonne.  Profane, lusting, loving – often shocking – they make every page of THE MANATEE tingle with excitement!

Good Lord, it sounds like one of those godawful romance novels my mother used to devour.

So I needed to find out more about this book.  Yeah, I could sit and read it… but I really bought the book for the cover, which I wanted to use in a blog post.  I wasn’t interested in Nantucket fishing – if that were the case, I’d go rent The Perfect Storm.

This TIME Magazine article from 1945 shed more light on the history of The Manatee.  But it wasn’t enough.  I needed to search some more.

Eventually I came across another blogger’s review of the book.  And apparently, among the many publishers and reprinters of this whale of a tale – the copy I have was from Pyramid Books – one of the publishers was a small company from Winnipeg named Harlequin Books.

Yep… The Manatee was indeed published by Harlequin Books.

Now in its early days, Harlequin published several “historical fiction” sweeping epic dramas like The Manatee. and eventually they received the rights to reprint a series of “doctor and nurse in love” books from the British publisher Mills & Boon.  Those stories were so popular and profitable for the company, that Harlequin focused their entire efforts on romance novels.  Eventually, they even bought the Mills & Boon publishing company!

Today, Harlequin is one of the most profitable publishers out there.  They release over 100 new titles a month, and their devotees gobble them up like bonbons.

Including my mother – she was a member of the “Harlequin Reader’s Club” and the company couldn’t send those texts to her fast enough.

And the first book this company ever published…

Was a reprint of this tale of whaling and love called The Manatee…

And had The Manatee never seen the light of day, we wouldn’t have had those insipid romance novels that my mother read voraciously.

All because of this one book.

With that in mind, let me do my best Charlton Heston impersonation.  Okay, I’m going to need a beach, a horse and Linda Harrison.

“YOU MANIACS!  YOU PRINTED IT UP! AW, CURSE YOU!! CURSE YOU ALL TO HELL!!!”

Oh, and by the way, if you feel corageous enough to actually READ this book, you can sample a copy of this tome through Google Books, and it’s available on Amazon.com.