When Gross came up with his idea to publish a line of gothic romances, he drafted a memo to his art director about the covers. “I want a category format that my mother and aunts would be proud to be seen reading,” he wrote. “Make the heroine look like a very refined upper-class blond young woman with good cheekbones….She’s running towards you…behind her is a dark castle with one light in the window, usually in the tower. Make the tower tall and thick. Believe me, they’ll get the phallic imagery.”
