For Ever and For Now

Around the world, people find strange and wonderful ways to celebrate the rituals of love: the best are captured here in entertaining prose and beautiful illustrations. The perfect gift on Valentine’s Day, on a wedding anniversary or any other relationship anniversary – and for all those you love!
Ways to say I love you: whatever the occasion, wherever in the world, people celebrate their love – with rituals and customs to make that elusive emotion visible, audible, tangible. Take the carving and presenting of lovespoons in Wales, their rich decoration symbolic of timeless love, or the bidding for eligible partners as part of May Day celebrations along the Rhine – or the astonishingly unspoilt celebration of male sexuality that is Japan’s Kanamara Matsuri, where the parade features gigantic phallic symbols and visitors merrily suck penis-shaped lollipops...
Love has its poetic, comic, curious, crazy and endearing traditions and those collected here provide intriguing insights into foreign cultures – and our own. They show the many things that love can be. And for those in love, this book also contains ideas about how to find inspiration in these customs as well as recipes for crazier or more intimate celebrations of love.