Melville House Books

Well, if one has to date online, I guess this would be the best way to go about it.  Last summer, Penguin UK teamed up with Match.com to start “Penguin Dating,†a service that pairs people up by the books that they enjoy, instead of “idle frippery like hair colour and star sign.â€

And just to be clear, they don’t exclude: “Now we don’t want to get too snobby here, because one woman’s Vampire Encyclopaedia is another’s love at first bite.,” they explain on the site. “A young buck reading a history of Goldman Sachs might be exactly what you’re after even though you’re busy stockpiling Marian for a week in the Balearics. Sometimes it’s enough to provoke curiosity when a person’s reading taste jars with your mental image of what they should be reading. That guy who looks like he’s just clocked-off from a building site, surely he can’t be clutching the collected works of Jane Austen?â€

Apparently Penguin is just hopping on the bandwagon in England, where books are now officially “sexy†and even libraries are throwing singles mixers.  So please, tell me why this hasn’t caught on across the Atlantic?  Twitter isn’t going to save publishing, but speed-dating book clubs at your local pub might!