By Carol Tannenhauser

Whether you’re looking for billionaire romance, gay romance, vampire romance, any kind of romance at all (except Amish, which must be ordered), it will be easier to find now that Book Culture, at 450 Columbus Avenue and 536 West 112^th Street, has given romance novels a section of their own.

It might seem like a curious choice for an independent store that holds discussions on high-brow topics like social genomics and has an investment from the publisher of Harper’s Magazine.

But the store’s owner thinks there may be more demand for the books than is immediately apparent.

The idea came to owner Chris Doeblin after he met New York Times bestselling romance writer Eloisa James and learned that she was also a professor of Shakespeare at Fordham University. Book Culture threw a party for her latest book, Seven Minutes in Heaven, at the Columbus Avenue store, which Doeblin called, in an email to WSR, “loads of fun… [with] the most inspired ‘fans’ I’d ever seen.”

“Romance lit has always been consigned by the literati to grocery and drug stores,” he wrote, “and many indy bookshops wouldn’t want to ‘sully’ their offerings with ‘romance novels.’” It dawned on Doeblin that they could have become the reason for the low demand for romance in their stores; “it wasn’t because it was a lesser genre and largely unwanted, but that no one bought it here because we didn’t have any.”

James writes that people mistakenly think high-brow city-dwellers won’t be interested in romance books. “Yet market research shows that the readership for my historical bestsellers overlaps with a literary readership, focused in cities and among college educated. In fact, one of my closest friends, an English professor at Columbia University, calls my books ‘crack for intellectuals.'”

Now Book Culture has have a wide selection, based on a list of James’ personal favorites. “One of the wonderful things about literature is that it takes us to places where we can be someone else,” Doeblin wrote. “Romances take us to places of the heart. We can unfetter ourselves of anything and any worry. A lover’s embrace is finally felt…the eyes that land upon us find beauty…we are desired and that desire can be consummated without interruption – at the perfect time of day, with all the lights and sounds and reciprocation and rapaciousness or gentleness that we long for on the way to work.”