Book dedications can be illuminating, funny (Lemony Snicket), sweet (I love CS Lewis's in The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe), sometimes boring. "For my family," writes Margaret Atwood in Oryx and Crake, which is lying on my desk.

But they're rarely as romantic as economist Peter Leeson's, who proposed to his girlfriend in the dedication for his book The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates. "Ania, I love you; will you marry me?" he wrote. "If I've succeeded in hiding my plans from her since writing this, she should be very surprised, he explained in his preface. "I hope she says 'yes'. If she doesn't, I might have to turn to sea banditry, which would be tough since I don't know how to sail."
He, and his publisher Princeton University Press, went to great lengths to keep the proposal a secret, even removing the section of the book from advance proofs, and – hurrah for a happy ending – Ania did say yes.

It won't agree with everyone, but it's certainly memorable – and has set me thinking about other "classics" of the micro-genre. Strangely hard to imagine a British writer being this unbuttoned in print, though there are some inscriptions in literary history that are quite memorably fulsome. [TS Eliot's thank you to Ezra Pound at the beginning of The Waste Land is a famous one, and Laurence Sterne performs a real feat of forelock-tugging at the beginning of Tristram Shandy.

Any others we should add to the list?