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chelsebooks.bsky.social
Chels
@chelsebooks.bsky.social
1.5K followers 200 following 210 posts
Writer, romance book collector, and co-host of the Reformed Rakes podcast.

theloosecravat.substack.com
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chelsebooks.bsky.social
being an Oscar Van Rhijn fan is so logical to me. He schemes! He slouches! He has quiet zingers!
Oscar Van Rhijn from the TV show The Gilded Age. He is wearing a hat and fancy sunglasses, a very stylish man in the late 19th century.
August 14, 2025 at 9:02 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
go through some newspaper archives, they said. it'll be FUN, they said
Screenshot of newspaper clipping that says "Move over, Fabio. Book publishing's new cover boy is Newt Gingrich."
July 8, 2025 at 1:48 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
Sanj also wrote about this

baskinsuns.substack.com/p/sex-romanc...
This isn’t the first time I’ve felt this disconnected from bookish community because of some strangely regressive views on sex and sexuality. Last year, after St. Martin’s Press sent out PR boxes containing vibrators and lube to influencers, some of whom were not aware they were on PR lists for the publisher and hadn’t agreed to receive PR, there was a flurry of discussion around the implications of foisting sex toys onto non-consenting adults. The book being promoted was a queer adult romance novel by the very popular queer adult romance novelist Casey McQuiston, and all influencers involved were adults (as far as I know), but social media was still speckled with concern to the effect of: “What if I opened this PR box in front of a child! That’s so inappropriate!” I was, until recently, unaware of the actual shape and design of the vibrator in question, but without much information or context besides the meta-conversation about how inappropriate it was, the visual in my head grew bigger and wilder by the day. I was expecting a Hitachi wand with “jorkin my penits” engraved on the side. What I discovered was a dark green Beauty Blender in a tasteful brown cardboard case labeled “personal massager,” from Maude, the lifestyle brand. The lube was in a small, dark bottle labeled “organic personal lubricant.” I’d walked past the vibrator no fewer than 200 times when I walked into the C-Town at the end of my street when I lived in Brooklyn, shelved prominently just above the flowers. It is prominently, unavoidably visible to all customers, located in the entryway. The first time I squinted at it while retrieving a grocery cart, I thought it was a tulip bulb. Far be it from me to defend a publisher from criticism. SMP merits much critique (see the footnotes), and it is absolutely annoying or frustrating to receive mail you haven’t agreed to receive. It isn’t my ministry to tell people not to be angry about something. I do, however, find it hard to lend credence to the idea that the existence of this PR box constitutes material harm, and think that it behooves us not to construct hypothetical harm to defend our beliefs. When people started inventing scenarios of influencers opening PR packages in front of abusive intimate partners and being harmed, then attributing the fault of that imaginary, nonspecific harm to a marketing professional and not, say, the intimate partner, all I could think was that somewhere, we’d lost the plot badly. Also, the tenuous or wholly invented linkage of queer adult sex and sexuality (fictional or real) to harm against children is a tale as old as homophobia itself, and one that I watched supposed “allies” skate right past in their crusade.
June 2, 2025 at 9:57 AM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
one of sanjana's recent newsletters touched on this. a must-read

baskinsuns.substack.com/p/romance-di...
"No one ever seems to be able to point to a real, living, breathing adolescent harmed by the supposed epidemic of mis-shelving Icebreaker. No one ever seems to consider that, rather than having these books pressed into their hands by sin-peddlers in their seedy neighborhood indie bookstore, teenagers might seek out explicitly sexual material of their own free will on God’s green internet because they are, again, horny. No one ever considers that a book in which the main characters engage in consensual, extremely pleasurable sex (truly, Stasi orgasms enough to power the state of Rhode Island) while wearing condoms may be fun and perfectly developmentally appropriate. We are all obsessed with the plight of hypothetical children encountering hypothetically harmful material in a hypothetical place where bare-minimum parenting, competent booksellers, informed teachers, and literate librarians do not exist. Won’t somebody please stop thinking of the children for like two seconds?"
January 27, 2025 at 4:22 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
ex:
Screenshot of "Delicious" by Sherry Thomas, with a 3.62 Goodreads rating
January 8, 2025 at 4:21 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
one thing that really stresses me out is in the 90s everyone interviewing Fabio would be like "omg what beautiful hair you have!" and his hair looked like this
Fabio in an I Cant Believe it's Not Butter! ad. His hair is very dry and kind of stringy
January 7, 2025 at 4:31 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
happy Carol day
Scene from the movie Carol where Cate Blanchett says "I like the hat" to Rooney Mara very flirtatiously. Rooney Mara's character is wearing a department store Santa hat
December 25, 2024 at 4:36 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
had to go to the grocery store today
Ralph Fiennes as the archbishop in the movie Conclave. He is sitting down and praying, looking beleaguered
December 24, 2024 at 1:19 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
okay grandpa lets get you to bed
screenshot of text that says, "Book-Tok my ass. Who under 30 even reads “serious literature” anymore. The kids just say TLDR (Too Long Didn’t Read). It should be TBDT for Gen Z: Too Bad Don’t Think. Ever connect the laziness, lack of reading and lack of historical understanding of virtually anything with our dumb zombie political polarization?"
December 7, 2024 at 10:26 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
I dont know if I said this at the time but im just remembering when Rebecca Yarros mispronounced the Gaelic words she put in her book and then a bunch of Americans BookTokers dunked on her but, hilariously, mispronounced "Gaelic"
Meme of Spiderman pointing at himself
November 29, 2024 at 4:03 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
cannot recommend this book enough btw
Book cover of Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama.
November 26, 2024 at 2:21 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
have to hand it to Lafayette that is an *extremely* good motto
"He had the finest Parisian craftsmen work on the sword, which had Lafayette's unintentionally apt motto "Cur non" (Why not?) engraved on the handle."
November 26, 2024 at 2:18 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
the boys are up to no good
Suspicious looking cats who are also my sons. One is a grey tabby and the other is orange. The grey tabby is wearing a tank top with strawberries on it.
November 25, 2024 at 10:23 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
I'm not sure what starter packs are bringing folks here but I will take it
Screenshot of the guy from the "succulent Chinese meal" guy saying "This is democracy manifest" as he gets arrested
November 25, 2024 at 3:47 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
Important recommendation!!!
I think people are sleeping on the best historical romance release of 2024, which is Elizabeth Kingston’s medieval, One Burning Heart. "For all my life, I have trained my sight on the empty space between what men of God have taught, and what they have done." (I kind of hate doing these types of pitches but if it gets more people to read it, I’ll try: It’s Cecilia Grant’s A Lady Awakened meets Meredith Duran’s Written on Your Skin meets the Duke of Jervaulx’s final speech in Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale.) Book cover for Elizabeth Kingston's One Burning Heart. The cover image is a close-up of a man holding a sword very close to his body.
November 20, 2024 at 10:20 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
Reading (adult film star) Howie Gordon's biography and his description of his editor's initial reaction to his book will live in my brain forever
Wasting no time, she grabbed my attention with a pointed question: "Tell me, sir, why do you persist on putting word to page to tell a story that most people of the world will think of as a crime braggadocio or else a hideous groan of underachievement?"
November 19, 2024 at 12:18 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
where are my people
Russell Crowe as Javert in the Les Miserables movie (2012), soulfullly staring out of a window.
November 15, 2024 at 5:34 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
oh hey new people! Unfortunately I have nothing to add to discourse right now except my encyclopedic knowledge of Fabio Lanzoni. Part 2 is out now!

reformedrakes.com/episodes/fab...
Reformed Rakes presents: Fabio Part Two
November 9, 2024 at 7:11 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
We spoke about Steve Sandalis/The Topaz Man on last week's episode Reformed Rakes podcast! You might know he was Topaz Books' answer to Fabio, but you might *not* know he repeatedly called Fabio old in the press. (Fabio was 32) #romancelandia

reformedrakes.com/episodes/fab...
Those literary hunks, Fabio and Topaz Man, square off Topaz Man signing autographs in front of three cardboard cutouts of himself Newspaper articles that says: Romance in the Flesh. Topaz Man: His last looks sell books Left: The Topaz Man on the cover of Romantic Times Magazine. Right: The Topaz Man on the cover of Playgirl.
October 22, 2024 at 7:40 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
best part of the ep imo
Screenshot from Maury that says "Scott Wulf: Wife is obsessed with romance novels"
October 22, 2024 at 7:32 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
it gets weird
October 15, 2024 at 2:36 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
A podcast deep-dive that nobody asked for: on Reformed Rakes we are chronicling the rise of cover model Fabio, his beef with romance authors, and the shady manager who launched him into superstardom. #romancelandia

reformedrakes.com/episodes/fab...
Reformed Rakes presents: Fabio Part One
October 15, 2024 at 2:20 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
Both of the Janet Dailey episodes are up on the Reformed Rakes podcast! I dont think I can prepare you for the route episode one goes down: fame, country music, and scandal.

reformedrakes.com/episodes/jan...
June 12, 2024 at 1:10 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
Pembroke Park was written by Michelle Martin and published by Naiad Press, one of the first, and largest lesbian publishing houses. Naiad closed its doors in 2003, and Pembroke Park is out of print. You can buy my copy tho! More pics here:
Pembroke Park by Michelle Martin. The cover has two illustrated women. One is wearing an empire waist gown, the other is in breeches and boots. A page of the book that says "A bit of a departure: the first lesbian regency novel" Pembroke Park by Michelle Martin, inside page showing it was published by The Naiad Press Inc in 1986.
May 4, 2024 at 3:34 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
If you've felt like the discussion around pregnancy in romance regularly veers into cruelty, then do I have the podcast episode for you reformedrakes.com/episodes/pre... #romancelandia
Reformed Rakes feat basinsuns present: Pregnancy in romance. Search for "Reformed Rakes" on your preferred podcast platform
April 16, 2024 at 5:55 PM