Romance Novels (1970s)

St. Valentine's Day is a fitting day to show you some of the novels that pandered to women's romantic fantasies during the 1970s.

Same Job Less Pay (1970) tells the story of a woman who falls in love with a co-worker. When she finds out that he earns twice as much as she does, she's so relieved she doesn't have to carry around all that heavy money that she bakes some pretty little cakes and falls pregnant.

Biological Necessity (1976) is about a woman who, having failed to meet a partner with an emotional IQ higher than a sandwich, takes an evening eugenics class in which she learns that romance is an overvalued social construct and that she is in fact most compatible with men who have a strong EPAS1 gene and an income of more than 100k per annum.

Carcinoma Equals Inheritance (1971). A woman encourages her husband to smoke in a bid to kill him for the substantial inheritance. When he dies, she suddenly remembers that she was the wealthy one all along. Shortly afterwards, a young, penniless con man falls in love with her and proposes marriage. On the honeymoon he encourages her to get drunk on vodka and take part in a series of dangerous sports.

Set in the year 1620, Tortured In The Name Of God's Unconditional Love (1974) is about a woman who falls in love with a pious town elder. She tries to tell him and other backward villagers about rudimentary first-world concepts such as interpersonal communication skills and oral hygiene. She is subsequently tortured and killed by a devout lynch mob, headed by her would-be lover, whose grasp of such things extends to believing that the demonic spirits of pigs can destroy crops by hiding in your nose.

"Fraction Action" Charity Newspaper Ad (1972)

Many charities in 1970s Scarfolk were actually illegal fronts for corporate and political organisations.

Rising costs meant that even the once reliable trading of unsatisfactory citizens was not enough to feed expanding budgets. Additional revenue sources had to be found.

The charity 'Fraction Action' (see newspaper ad above) was the brainchild of Sir John Elegy who was not only a member of Scarfolk council but also had shares in Scarfolk Laboratories, a company owned by the Cavalier Pharmaceutical company (see 'Discovering Scarfolk' for more details).

To be fair, 'Fraction Action' did redirect some of the donations it received: 1.2p out of every £100,000 was put in a jar in the Scarfolk Labs canteen as a contribution to the dinner ladies' Christmas lunch. The remainder of the donations was consumed by 'administration' (i.e., administering recreational medication), 'running costs' (i.e., running to ground people who had been farm-bred specifically for hunting) and 'over heads' (i.e., literally expensive flights abroad).

The 'Fraction Action' campaign ads also efficiently foreshadowed and justified the council's later random purging of citizens, which was necessary if Scarfolk Labs was to continue its crucial genetic experiments into human/furniture hybridisation, a noted example of which was the Hair Chair.