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Image: Red rose on old book. View from above. by Flickr user Nenad Stojkovic (deleted account) (CC BY 2.0)

Make a Valentine in the Library

The library is hosting a craft table behind the circulation desk on the second floor of the Learning Commons.

Come take a break and create something fun for Valentine's Day!

The History of Valentine's Day

The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets (via Credo Reference) explains the origins of Valentine's Day:

Valentine's Day, legends say, metamorphosed from a pagan fertility ritual to a commemoration of Christian martyrs named Valentine, and then to a saint's day. Today, Valentine's Day is an international lovers’ celebration and a candy sellers’ delight.

Possibly because of its hypothetical erotic origin, 14 February became associated with love by such writers as Chaucer and Shakespeare. By the eighteenth century, English sweethearts were exchanging handwritten Valentine's Day love notes. By the nineteenth century, mass-produced paper-lace cards were fashionable in England and in the United States.

Late in the nineteenth century, chocolates, long believed to be an aphrodisiac, became a favored Valentine's Day gift. The finest were boxed in red or pink heart-shaped containers boasting all the frills, lace, and ribbons of Valentine cards. The English confectioner Richard Cadbury is credited with creating the first heart-shaped chocolate box in 1868.

Other candy makers also profited from the holiday. In the United States in 1902, the New England Confectionery Company (NECCO) began stamping out inexpensive sugary conversation hearts called “Sweethearts.” Still popular today, the tiny candies bear messages such as “Marry Me” or “True Love.”

Valentine's Day is celebrated in many countries, with everything from roses to heart-shaped cakes and cookies. But candy, especially chocolates, is among the most popular gifts. Typically, men give candy to women, though in Japan women give candy to men on 14 February, and the men reciprocate in March.

Tireless promotion of the holiday has led to sweet success for candy makers and retailers. According to the National Confectioners Association, U.S. confectionery sales for Valentine's Day currently add up to more than a billion dollars a year, 75 percent of which is for chocolate.

eBook Poetry Selections

Here are some results from a search for books under the subject Love Poetry in the library's eBook Collection:

(Re)Generation: the poetry of Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm (eBook, 2021)
"(Re)Generation contains selected poetry by Anishinaabe writer Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm exploring a range of issues: from violence against Indigenous women and lands to Indigenous erotica and the joyous intimate encounters between bodies."

The nectar of pain (eBook, 2018) by Najwa Zebian
"Zebian sheds light on the feelings and experiences that emerge from a painful heartbreak. ... She holds her readers by the hand as they heal."

Sonnets from the Portuguese (eBook, 2009) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"...the collection of love poems written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the time leading up to her marriage to Robert Browning. Elizabeth hesitated in publishing the poems, as they were so personally revealing, but her husband persuaded her of their high worth. She decided to pass them off as translations, in order to obscure her authorship, and so the title of the collection came about. They were, and remain, immensely popular."

Bending the bow: an anthology of African love poetry (eBook, 2009) ed. by Frank M. Chipasula
"This anthology is a work of literary archaeology that lays bare a genre of African poetry that has been overshadowed by political poetry. Frank Chipasula has assembled a historically and geographically comprehensive wealth of African love poetry that spans more than three thousand years."

The poetry of Sappho: an expanded edition, featuring newly discovered poems (eBook, 2007) translated by Jim Powell
"Today, thousands of years after her birth, in lands remote from her native island of Lesbos and in languages that did not exist when she wrote her poetry in Aeolic Greek, Sappho remains an important name among lovers of poetry and poets alike. Powell's translations represent a unique combination of poetic mastery in English verse and a deep scholarly engagement with Sappho's ancient Greek."

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