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

McGill faculty’s academic publications are internationally renowned and many of our professors are top of their field. Come check out what they have to say in the new Redpath Book Display, on now until the end of December. This selection rounds up some of the best publications McGill faculty has to offer since 2010. Highlights include works by prestigious authors such as Alain Farah, Daniel J. Levitin and Charles Taylor.

Whether your area of interest is history, art, human rights or urban planning, there is sure to be for you. Many Women, Many Voices “celebrates the voices of women […]. Shining a light on the untold stories of the women who have shaped McGill and Montreal, it offers illustrated vignettes from the ROAAr collections – Rare Books and Special Collections, the Osler Library of the History of Medicine, the Visual Arts Collection, and the McGill University Archives.”

Catherine Parr Traill’s The Female Emigrant’s Guide : Cooking with a Canadian Classic is the newest release from Nathalie Cooke, whose previous collection, The Johnson Family Treasury : a collection of household recipes & remedies, 1741-1848, is also included in the display. The National Post review of the Catherine Parr Traill book provides a great analysis of both the historical and culinary importance of the new edition.

Gabriella Coleman, the “world’s foremost scholar on Anonymous,” has 46K Twitter followers!  Trained as a cultural anthropologist, she researches, writes, and teaches on computer hackers and digital activism. Come check out her books on Anonymous and hacking.

Charmaine Nelson is the first tenured Black professor of Art History in Canada. Her latest single-author work, Slavery, Geography, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica, is “among the first Slavery Studies books – and the first in Art History – to juxtapose temperate and tropical slavery.”

A list of the items included in the display can be found here. A number of publications can also be accessed in ebook format.

Stop by and see if your favourite prof is on the shelf!