Though many deride Valentine’s Day as a holiday invented by greeting card companies, what better way to break up the long winter months than with a celebration of love to warm the cockles of our cold, cold hearts?

This month’s book display covers all types of love – from best friends to one-night stands to your grandparents’ marriage and everything in between. Coming at love from all angles, there are poets and artists and philosophers and psychologists. We have Shakespeare’s sonnets and a Leonard Cohen/Henri Matisse art mash up. Love: All That Matters, is a fascinating introduction to both the psychology and philosophy of love – and what matters most about it. There is Love Analyzed; Love, a history; Love and love sickness: the science of sex, gender difference, and pair-bonding; and just plain old Love.

Tired of Tinder? So are we! Put your thumb-swiping skills to use turning the pages of Love Online, which explores the “hypermarket of desire” that is online dating, or Labor of Love, in which Moira Weigel dives into the secret history of dating while holding up a mirror to the contemporary dating landscape, revealing why we date the way we do and explaining why it feels so much like work. If online dating’s got you down, The Hypothetical Girl, stories by Elizabeth Cohen, will make you feel less alone.

Don’t worry, there is a fair dose of sincerity amid all this flippancy. In Love, Tony Milligan addresses this mood of pessimism about the nature of love and explores the value and significance of love in fostering an enjoyable and successful life.

Whether you crave sweeping epics à la Anna Karenina, or more contemporary sagas such as The Time-Traveler’s Wife, we’ve got you covered. Underneath this veneer of sarcasm there does, indeed, lie a hopeless romantic, and we want to share all of our favourite love stories with you!

LOVE! book display in Redpath