Isn’t summer wonderful? Great weather and plenty of spare time are the best ingredients for a summer romance. If you can’t have your own, indulge with 10 gems from our catalog!

Let’s get in the mood with a bit of gossip! Thornton Hall has combed through the annals of the British gentry, from barons and duchesses to the Royal Family. He presents his juicy findings in Love Romances of the Aristocracy.

Already scandalous when confined to the upper crust, such loves are deemed unacceptable when lower classes are involved. When aristocrat Miles Arbuton proposes to orphaned Kitty Ellison, everybody is against the union. Read the novel Une rencontre by William Dean Howells to see if they will make it in the end.

When Helen and Burke were married, their friend’s reservations were spot on. Totally incompatible, the two make life hell for each other – and their daughter Betty, who is caught in between. Will they finally come together on The Road to Understanding in the novel by Eleanor H. Porter?

Famous poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson elaborates his understanding of The Three Great Virtues in three short essays. He updates the three concepts and presents his views on self-reliance (faith), love (hope) and friendship (charity).

Edwy’s friendship with faeries leads them to help spy on his girlfriend Aura to find out if she truly loves him. However, things don’t go as planned in Ann Radcliffe’s poem when Edwy literally loses himself in faery land.

The disappearances of Olof Koselka, however, are carefully planned. Wherever he goes, the young lumberjack turns the head of the town’s women folk, but he is not one to settle down. Johannes Linnankoski tells the story of a Finnish Don Juan in Laulu tulipunaisesta kukasa.

Dice Lashmore also tries to charm many women, but his goal is simple: to marry rich. However, Our Friend the Charlatan is not very successful and in the long run his life takes a downward turn in the novel by George Gissing.

Yoran’s life, however, could not be better. In Love of Zion, we follow the love story between him and his wives, and later that of their children. The book by Abraham Mapu is set at the time of the First Temple in Jerusalem when polygamy was still practised.

Mary Edwards Walker would have different views on polygamy – or would she? She was a Civil War surgeon and women’s rights activist and wrote with Unmasked, or the Science of Immorality – to gentlemen a sex manual that mixes surprisingly modern tips with Victorian sex myths.

Eric Marshall is a gentleman, but his thoughts are far from such things. He focuses instead on the mysterious girl he encountered one night when walking around Prince Edward Island… Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote Kilmeny of the Orchard, and this is our dramatic reading of the book.

Enjoy – and maybe find a summer romance of your own!

In the true spirit of equality, we celebrate the other half of the population this month! Let’s have a look at all kinds of men with 10 gems from our catalogue.

It all begins with the most important relationship, the one between Father and Son. In this memoir, the poet Edmund Gosse describes his childhood in a fundamentalist Christian home which, unfortunately, did not have a happy ending.

Find out for yourself if there’s a happy ending for The King of Ireland’s Son. Just when he had won Fedelma, the enchanter’s daughter, she is kidnapped by the King of the Land of Mist… This is an old Irish fairytale, retold by Padraig Colum.

Deep down, orphan Eddie of Jackson’s Gang also hopes for a fairytale, and his case this means finding his parents. But he’s only 9 and just got “adopted” into a group of thieves, so it doesn’t look good for him in the book by Brother Ernest Ryan.

It doesn’t look good for the American Mr. Jones either, who find himself in London with a mere 10 $ in his pocket. But then he meets a British Earl who has it all, status, money – and Jones’ face… What happens next to The Man Who Lost Himself can be found out in the book by H. De Vere Stacpoole.

When a young and single doctor ends up in a small town in the countryside, his future is quite predictable: The ladyfolk endeavour to make him a part of their social circle and try to find him a wife in the process. But when the time comes for Mr. Harrison’s Confessions, nothing is what it was before in the novel by Elizabeth Gaskell.

There’s not much to confess, really, for Richard Barlow, who was one of the most accomplished cricketers of the late 19th century. In his autobiography Forty Seasons of First-Class Cricket he describes highlights of his career and gives hints to umpires and young cricketers alike.

Henry James describes another teacher-pupil relationship in his novel The Lesson of the Master. A young and very promising writer meets his idol, and the old man is ready to share his wisdom about women. however, things sound good in theory, but everything changes when they need to be applied in practice…

Two men with lots of practice are George and Robert Stephenson, the former being known as the Father of the Steam Locomotive. Born in abject poverty, he worked his way up to becoming one of the foremost engineers in the 19th century railway world. Read this interesting biography written by Samuel Smiles.

Another man of excellence is John Lomax, who built the core body of work for the Library of Congress Archives and is one of the big names in American Western & Country music. The collection Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads contains more than 150 song lyrics collected all over the country.

Of all the men described above, the best kind is definitely The Good-Natured Man, like Honeywood who is generous to a fault to friends and foes alike. However, his uncle tries to cure him from what he perceives as foolishness, which does not turn out the way he intended in the fun play by Oliver Goldsmith.

Enjoy – and celebrate the men in your life!