In this week’s podcast episode, we’re looking at the incredible ads and features for the October 1999 issue of RT Magazine.
Thank you to Mari for this issue, and thank you to Alison for co-hosting with us!
You can also find all the RTRW content at our category page for Romantic Times Rewind.
If you want to listen and follow along with this entry, we have more detail in the audio, but you can click play and listen and read and absorb all the visual goodness:
Ok, let’s get started!
The cover is pretty boring. Purple flowers, purple flowers everywhere. That little cutout is interesting.
These people are very windy:
But in the cover for His Wicked Ways, ( A ) which seems to have a keyhole cut in the cover and a stepback, the diamond shows a dude on a horse with an erect tower?
Where’d the windy couple go?!
Did you know that Anne Rice had a comic version of The Tale of the Body Thief? I had no memory of this.
That picture is the “stunning artwork depicting Anne’s vision of Lestat,” who, according to Amanda, looks like Sean Penn? She’s not wrong.
The ad for the rising stars of romance offered us some TRULY INCREDIBLE COVERS that I am so excited to share with you.
This guy’s horny.
The tagline is incredible “He was larger than life in every respect, from his broad chest to his muscular arms…”
- Arms and chest are in the same limited region of the body.
- What are you trying to say here? No, I’m kidding, I get it.
- That ellipsis is doing a lot of work.
The ad for rising stars also featured Leslie Kelly’s Night Whispers ( A ):
Look at that leer! He’s giving Amanda “Christian Slater vibes,” but I think he looks like Seann William Scott in Dude, Where’s my Car.
Whose Leer Reigns Supreme? The guy above, or this guy?
WAIT. Do you think the dude in Night Whispers is the descendant of the dude in My Season of Scandal?! I need an Ancestry.com search on the Leer dudes.
Did you know there was a Romance Calendar?! RT sold so many that they had to go back to the bookstores they’d sold calendars to and buy them back to fulfill all the mail orders!
Did you have this calendar? Do you recognize that cover art? That lightning looks kinda close by. Dude and his horse may want to head inside stat.
This ad for The Black Angel ( A ) led me down a wonderful rabbit hole of cover art.
The black and white image really says a lot, but just wait.
This is the original cover:
Chest OUT. As Amanda says, like a pigeon! Talk about power pose.
This is the updated cover:
“Bring back horny chicken DeSalvo!”
You can see the fold marks in the scarf, and her hair is the envy of keratin treatment Instagram accounts everywhere. The gown is from…prom period, really.
But the audiobook is also a treasure!
That guy has a podcast.
He gave Amanda the Douche Chills.
This ad was fascinating:
Effective Friction?! How effective WAS the friction? Judging by how very pregnant she is:
I just noticed that model looks like a cross between Hugh Jackman and John Travolta. Did they have a dance off and this guy was born?
Also, as I said in the episode, I really thought that when I became an adult, my hair would start doing that full, cascading thing. She’s got Cybill Shepherd in Moonlighting hair.
This ad was also an interesting juxtaposition:
So the dude without the shirt who is heading to bone town in the desert with this woman is carrying a picture – is that the picture? The inset on the right? That’s what he’s carrying around?
This cover is also exquisite:
We had a whole debate as to who that guy looks like. I thought Ben Affleck, but Amanda sees Norm McDonald.
And the person in the white dress – does that look like Kim Basinger or Taylor Swift with a lip lift?
This is also a debate-worthy version of this cover, but it’s a very different debate:
Is that a colonial American in a hat? A lady with a bouffant hairdo? Or in a BIG HAT?
We need your help because we’re baffled.
MORE SMIRK! MORE SMIRK!
The cover in color:
Her expression!
That MULLET.
What’s she up to with that bucket?
I could visually explore this cover for ages.
Mr. Romance’s page always delivers:
Let’s take a closer look at a few of them:
That’s Andy, from Germany, and he wants you to see the strategically-placed flower on his swim trunks, I think.
Troy’s bio is something:
Eight nightclubs, loves meeting people.
Next is a full page color ad for Helen Rosburg, and her husband, who was a Mr. Romance contestant that year.
The license plate!
And Call of the Trumpet ( A ) is quite a cover:
That horse is DONE with whatever is happening. That is also an I’m About to Let One (™ Longmire’s very, very old post) pose:
The cover for Honor Among Thieves gave Alison the creeps:
I also noticed how many of the ads for ebooks in this issue had covers that were square, aka diskette size, instead of rectangle in portrait alignment like a paperback book:
There was a BIG BOO BOO in a previous issue of Romantic Times and they regret the inconvenience!
OOPS.
Imagine those phone calls. *shudder*
The RT BookLover’s Convention was in Toronto that year – international! – and this was one of the lead promo items in this issue:
The text reads:
The Art of Seduction: Bring More Romance into Your Life!
When Toronto native and professional seductress Mary Taylor learned the RT convention was coming to her hometown, she made us an offer we couldn’t refuse–to share her expertise in a workshop on how to seduce your lover in new and thrilling ways.
This three-hour program, which is also available on video and soon to be released in print, is designed with the average women in mind. Mary believes all women- regardless of age or size- are beautiful and have strong seductive powers, but most don’t know how to get started. Mary promises that this step-by-step workshop will empower women, teaching some of the best moves and techniques. Overcome your fears. titillate your lover, and celebrate female sexuality!
Whether you’re researching your novel or educating your libido, leave your inhibitions behind and learn how to unleash your fantasies on the man in your life. Not for the faint of heart–but a heck of a lot of fun! Workshop is on Friday from 3pm-6pm.
There’s a lot to unpack here, like the part where it seems to lean in on tiresome stereotypes about romance readers, or the part about how one qualifies as a ‘professional seductress,’ but also: three. hours.
THREE HOURS.
Oh my stars. Did you attend this? Can you please tell us everything?
Do you remember party lines?
What was that like? You get on a line with a bunch of people talking about…romance the genre or romance the interpersonal experience? “Come and experience the passion?” “The nation’s #1 romance and partyline?”
A group chat on the phone talking about romance…so how did that even work?
(No, we did not call this number.)
And this was the back cover, which featured a book with an iiiiiiinteresting stepback!
The cover is sort of interesting, with DeSalvo’s half face there, but look at the pose of the stepback:
He’s about to go downtown, right? That’s the implication here, yes?
Ok, then! Clearly they both attended the professional seduction seminar, all three hours!
So that was October 1999!
Remember, if you join the Patreon, you’ll get access to the entire issue as a PDF.
What do you think? Do you remember any of these books?
And how are you enjoying the RT Rewind episodes?
Many thanks, Sarah and Amanda! I had an absolute blast doing this.
I started high school in the 1999, and every time I foolishly catch myself thinking it wasn’t THAT long ago and things weren’t THAT different…the RT rewind is here to prove me wrong. Hahaha.
Lovely! I bought His Wicked Ways and Black Angel because of the reviews! Great magazine! Touched on a lot of facets of romance. I learned a lot about what tropes I liked by reading all the reviews. It’s amazing what you discover about yourself. There you go–that’s my two cents! Have a great day!
His Wicked Ways has a stepback cover. The cutout is over the guy on the horse, who is on the top half of the stepback with the windy couple shown in bottom half of the stepback.
The Black Angel painting is by Jon Paul Ferrara, probably my favorite romance cover artist.
The Brides of Durango: Elise art is by Pino Daeni who was a marvelous artist and whose work I still miss (and kind of collect, at least as covers and stepbacks on my romance novel collection).
I have read many of these books as I was mostly reading historical romance back in the 1990s and I own the ones I’ve mentioned above in their original glory (I really do have a romance novel collection, mostly for the art since I do not re-read–too many books, too little time).
For what it’s worth, I much prefer the original covers with their hunks and art.
If anyone is interested, I believe Troy Sutter won the pageant that year.
Here end’th the history lesson.
The couple on the cover of His Wicked Ways are experiencing some interesting weather as it’s blowing her hair one way and his the opposite direction — a true microclimate!
So I was reading the linked article on Judith McNaught and “Whitney, My Love” and went to Wikipedia to read more about her. This was a very interesting tidbit:
“In the early 1990s, Coors Brewing asked her to write a book that would appeal to women and could be used by the company to promote its women’s literacy program. Appalled at the discovery that one in five women was functionally illiterate, McNaught offered to rewrite her almost-completed manuscript, “Perfect”, to insert the literacy theme. The change took her an additional six weeks to incorporate. McNaught chose to donate a portion of her earnings from the book to women’s literacy programs and insisted that each book contain a card giving readers information on how to donate to literacy programs or to become tutors.”
This is so fantastic.
HeatherS: Thanks for sharing that! I’d never known that Coors had a program to promote women’s literacy. And that was the time period when I was volunteering as an adult literacy tutor.
Oh, I think my first release was around here in this one in 1999. Carolina Rose with Kensington. Those were the days!!!
Re Anne Rice and Lestat, I thought she envisioned him as Rutger Hauer. By the time they made the movie, however, she thought he was too old to play the part.
As for BLACK ANGEL, I read it back in the day. Liked it but found it a bit over the top even then. Also read the book about the heroine’s sister (NIGHT FIRE, I think) and was disappointed that she never wrote about the rest of the family. There were mixed race siblings raised as part of the family – which, of course, they were – and it would have been interesting to see how Samuels, a talented writer, captured their relationships with each other (quite loving in the two books she wrote) and the world at large.