How It All Began

Hello world.

Here’s a question for you: have you ever picked up a book, looked at the author photo, and thought: dang, that author’s attractive?

We have. Lots. In fact, we’ve seen so many attractive authors over our time as diehard CanLit reading fans that back in the summer of 2012 we came up with a fun little idea: wouldn’t it be great if we could get some of these attractive authors to pose for a calendar? And wouldn’t it be fun if said calendar was a little risqué, a little sexy? What if we got our authors to pose ... in the nearly-nude? A la Calendar Girls? Would they be up for it? Would the CanLit world be game?

So we put some lists together. We sent out some emails. And what do you know – the CanLit world was more than game for a sexy author calendar. Turns out there are plenty of Canadian writers out there eager to bare it all in the name of literature, especially if PEN Canada is involved as our enthusiastic charity of choice. And just like that, Bare It For Books was born.

Here’s the deal: our calendar will feature 12-13 Canadian authors posing with books, some book-related props ... and nothing else. It will be a 2014 calendar, available for sale in October of 2013. It will be classy. It will be fun. It will be sexy as hell.

The proceeds from the calendar will be donated to PEN Canada. We’ll be launching the Bare It For Books campaign officially this coming January.We’ll also be launching a website at the same time, a website that will track our fundraising progress and include other fun BIFB projects that we’ll be rolling out over the course of 2013.

In the interim, we’ll be using this handy little space to blog about our journey leading up to the campaign launch. We hope you enjoy.

Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions, want to know more about the campaign, or would  like to get involved. Send us an email. Follow us on Twitter. Stalk our blog (we don’t mind. Really).

Show us some literary love, folks, and we’ll show it right back.

Allegra & Amanda