Create a Literary Valentine

Does your special someone love to read? This gift will put a little spark into your relationship on Valentine’s Day, and it’ll only cost you a little time and some printer paper: customized classic literature.

1. Find a piece of romantic literature that’s in the public domain using Project Gutenberg. Let’s use Pride and Prejudice as our example.
2. Download the text to your computer and prepare it for eReading using these instructions.
3. Now for the fun part: using the Find and Replace feature of your word processor, replace the names of the romantic leads with your name the name of your beloved. In Pride and Prejudice, for instance, I would replace the name Elizabeth with the name Brenda (my wife), and replace the name Darcy with my last name.
4. Make sure you check for nicknames as well. Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, for example, also goes by Lizzy, so you would want to replace that name as well. Picking a familiar book will help with this.
5. Add page numbers, change fonts, do anything else you want to do to make it look fancy and/or romantic, then print it out.
6. You can embellish it with pictures (clip-art or personal pictures from your digital collection), you can bind it in a decorative three-ring binder, or you can just staple the pages together and give it as-is.

Here are some other books that you might consider:

• Emma by Jane Austen
• Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
• Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott

Try it out!