Over at the Huffington Post, they’re featuring love scenes set in bookstores, libraries, and other locations overflowing with books.

Guess who else got the question popped to her in a bookstore?

It’s true: The Boyfriend is now officially The Fiance. Aw heck yeah.

And he picked not just any bookstore in which to propose, but the iconic Raven Used Books in Cambridge. (The photo on your left on the front page is actually a pretty good shot of the exact location – I was standing in front of the chair at the time.)

I’d just discovered a used copy of Susan Signe Morrison’s Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics, and was weighing the glee of buying it versus the weight it would add to my bag, which I had to haul all the way back to Revere. (This is also the reason I didn’t walk off with every book they had on Christine de Pizan.)

So: I’m engaged in a rapt contemplation of the poo book, and The Boyfriend pokes me in the shoulder. I look up. He motions me over toward the music-related books (his oeuvre), and says, “So, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

…And shows me the ring.

When I stopped flapping, hyperventilating, and alternately saying “Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god.” and “Okay. Okay. Okay,” he said, “So…will you marry me?”

I think I said yes. Maybe I just squealed and hugged him. I forget.

The ring is itself a Big Deal, quite aside from it being my (OMG!) engagement ring: it’s also a family heirloom. But more on the ring in a separate post, because I want to give it the justice it deserves.

So, yes. OMG I GOT PROPOSED TO IN A BOOKSTORE. And, in case you’re wondering, I did not buy the poo book. But I did buy a first edition of Olive Schreiner‘s Woman and Labour, which went nicely with both my current interests (women’s studies, first-wave feminism and social justice issues, first editions 1880-1920) and with the copies of the 1920 Girl Scout Handbook Scouting for Girls and Margaret Sanger‘s Woman and the New Race I had picked up earlier in the week at Brattle Book Shop.

I came home with a total of three books after a week in Boston.  That must be some kind of record.  I hope it doesn’t get me in trouble with the bibliophile secret society!  But I also came home with an engagement ring and an awesome fiance, so I still win.  :)