Literature's first recorded faked male orgasm belongs, somewhat unexpectedly, to Giacomo Casanova, and cinema's finest of either sex to that scene in When Harry Met Sally. But it has taken until now for the book world to contemplate the possibility that it is experiencing its first fully faked book.

I don't mean the ghosted happening that is the prose of certain media favourites, but a book faked in its very conception, inspired by the scenes in the new Sex and the City movie when Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) quotes from a heretofore non-existent book: Love Letters of Great Men. Bookstores and Amazon have been inundated with requests for a compilation that promises a “how-to” for aspiring romantic letter-writers, and the book is duly being published this week.

There's an accompanying viral marketing campaign on Facebook - where SatC has a particular following - and so, to the world of virtual-friendship and TV-inspired cinema comes literature, faking in the wake. The truth is, however, Love Letters of Great Men is a fascinating new slant on history - famous men caught with pen in hand and heart in mouth - and by turns the collection is touching, inspiring, and, let's face it, a gauntlet thrown down to a writer ...

Now like many men (and this may well be the only thing I have in common with Carrie's Mr Big), I have never quite got round to writing a love letter as such. I needn't feel too ashamed. The bravest literary lions tend to lose their roar when faced with those two words linked together - “love” and “letter” - and who would dare to put finger to keyboard and even attempt these days to update some of the curlicued passion quoted in Love Letters of Great Men? Beethoven addressed his inamorata as “Immortal Beloved” and Nelson called Emma Hamilton his “Alpha and Omega”.

Times Archive, 1824: Sayings of Lord Byron

Give a woman a looking glass and a few sugar-plums and she will be satisfied

BACKGROUND

• Love Letters of Great Men

• The letters between friends that span 50 years

• Letters mingle souls

I tend to begin e-mails with “Hiya pet”.

You have to have sympathy for Chris Noth's Mr Big. There he is, on and off and on and off with Manhattan's most bizarrely costumed transvestite perfume saleswoman, and he is expected to compete with literary and historical giants, when, frankly, there are the ghosts of enough men already - great, Big or whatever - in the bedrooms of SatC's leading ladies.

But there are lessons for any tongue-tied swain in this lithe, if alarmingly pink, tome. It amounts to the straight guy's guide on how to fake it at love letters (e-mails don't count) - with even a bit of Oscar Wilde to Bosie thrown in to show you how it should really be done. So here are the key revelations, for those of you too busy texting to read the book:

1. Don't live together, or even see each other that often

The best and most passionate love letters seem to be sent to the unrequited, the absent, or the unobtainable. Napoleon berates Josephine for not writing to him on campaign in Italy, Robert Browning plots Elizabeth Barrett's escape from her father, Balzac writes feverishly to his unavailable married mistress. Don't think you get off for being married, either. Lots of these are from husbands. Some of them even write to their wives. But distance, clearly, makes the prose flow stronger.

2. Be willing to stretch bounds of language

“Unspeakably belovedest” (Nathaniel Hawthorne to Sophia Peabody) and “My Own Dearest Wifie” (Parnell to Kitty O'Shea) are some of my favourites - but this is exactly where you can tell these letters were not intended for publication.

3. Don't call her a slut, however

This worked for Laurence Sterne in 1760: “the hole in the heart, which you have made, like the dear, enchanting slut as you are ...” It might not go down so well today.

4. Make sure she knows you're lonesome tonight

William Congreve manages this magisterially: “in the midst of crowds I remain in solitude ... unlovely objects all around me, excepting thee”, but you can go too far. Love Letters of Great Men reads often like “Men who think they are Great and go on about themselves a lot”, which may be one part of feeling in love, but cannot have pleased all the recipients.

5. If you're breaking up, do it well

“When I quit you, or rather you, from a sense of duty to your husband ... quit me,” wrote Byron to Caroline Lamb, “you shall acknowledge the truth of what I again promise and vow ... it is to you and to you only ... I was, and am yours, freely and entirely, to obey, to honour, love and fly with you, when, where, and how, yourself might and may determine.”

6. Ideally, die

This is best done within hours of the postmark, and before arrival of the letter.

Love Letters ends with a somewhat fey postcard from the trenches, poignant only because the soldier did not return. War brings out the best letter writing, and that sense of yearning is the key note of most of these letters.

Not all these are great letters, and not all these are great men, whatever that might mean. But out of a - dare I say it - somewhat cynical idea of faking up a book has come an unexpected reminder of what we are in danger of losing in the age of instant and electronic communication; the structuring of love - silly, heartfelt or heartbreaking - into whole paragraphs of thought. Which is more than Carrie Bradshaw ever seemed to manage, despite writing newspaper columns on the subject.

Love Letters of Great Men edited by Ursula Doyle
Macmillan, £9.99; 143pp Buy the book

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