Check out the fiction books on eBay, and you will most likely find many thousands of listings for Harlequin, Silhouette, Desire, Temptation, Candlelight, and Regency romances, all up for grabs for a pittance!  What a windfall for collectors!

Romance novels have always been popular, and purchasing them on eBay is simple!  Lots of us have been buying huge lots, hoping you get the ones you want out of the deal, and maybe finding a few you want out of dozens in the lot.  Then what do you do with all the ones you don't want?  You try to resell them. 

But just LOOK at the competition out there!

  You are working with 15000+ sellers who have grundles and grundles of these books that they picked up at yard sales, or from estate sales, for a few bucks for a box holding hundreds of them!   Sometimes, the seller is selling off a one-owner collection, and the books are pristine and undamaged.  Other times, the books arrive with the pages dog-eared or missing and the covers ripped half off.   It just depends and what you're looking for.

Who cares, you say?  Why be concerned about condition when all you wanna do is have a nice evening's read, and then into the trash it'll go? 

Well, some folks actually collect romance books, and the more avid collectors often pay upwards of $5.00 a book for the hard to find ones, in near mint condition, with unbroken splines and clean, undamaged pages.  Especially for the vintage books!  Some of the best authors in romance are out there, and many of them were just starting out back in the early 80's, when Harlequin introduced it's sexier lines of romance novels (such as Desires and Temptations).  Not be be outdone in a changing market, Dell introduced their own steamier line called Candlelight Ecstasy Romances. Other publishers also jumped on the bandwagon, and the market was inundated with delightfully steamy romances waiting for the reader to purchase.

Harlequin Booksellers published a couple dozen lines of books, but none became as popular as the Silhouette Desires.  Using award-winning authors and a snazzy new look, Harlequin cornered the market on steamy romance back then, and many of these vintage romance novels are worth more today than they were when they were issued new!

The books are identified in special number runs, and twelve books in each series or grouping were issued every month.  To collect a complete unbroken set of the issues, a buyer had to pre-order, be there when the shipment arrived, or race to beat out other rabid consumers who adored these first edition romances!  Often, many of the sets would be impossible to collect because others bought just one or two of the books, leaving only a finite number of full sets out there. 

Romance connoisseurs look for the best of the best, and try to get all the books in each mini-series like "Royal Weddings", "Man of the Month", or "follow that baby!".  The canny publishers contracted with certain well-known authors to write books in each series; and to promote them, they advertised them months in advance!  Some sets were sold out before they even reached bookstore shelves. 

You can find lists of the various sets on the publisher websites, or by writing to the publisher, if you are interested in starting a collection, or fleshing out an existing one.  If you are missing one or two in a particular series, you can do an author or title search, and you will find the ones for sale on eBay and Half.Com.  If sellers list items in each batch, you can locate the ones you are after, or the authors you prefer. Most sellers, however, just give a list of titles without adding the authors, and eBay searches don't work as well on those.

I started collecting these books by buying them from my older sis, who pre-ordered every set and bought all twelve books in each set for many years. She read each book once, and then packed them away. I have about 9,000 books in boxes in my garage! Luckily, I have doubles of many of them, and have sold some to keep paying for new ones!

So if you collect like I do, keep an eye out for the ones in better shape, and try to get the best books available for your collection.  However, if you just want a good evening's reading, don't worry about condition or first or second or third editions.  Buy one of those big box lots.  Some eBay sellers give you 20 or 30 books a pop...Just buy and enjoy!