Portable Magic
A History of Books and Their Readers
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A history of one of humankind’s most resilient and influential technologies over the past millennium—the book. Revelatory and entertaining in equal measure, Portable Magic will charm and challenge literature lovers of all kinds as it illuminates the transformative power and eternal appeal of the written word.
Stephen King once said that books are “a uniquely portable magic.” Here, Emma Smith takes readers on a literary adventure that spans centuries and circles the globe to uncover the reasons behind our obsession with this captivating object.
From disrupting the Western myth that the Gutenberg Press was the original printing project, to the decorative gift books that radicalized women to join the anti-slavery movement, to paperbacks being weaponized during World War II, to a book made entirely of plastic-wrapped slices of American cheese, Portable Magic explores how, when, and why books became so iconic. It’s not just the content within a book that compels; it’s the physical material itself, what Smith calls “bookhood”: the smell, the feel of the pages, the margins to scribble in, the illustrations on the jacket, its solid heft. Every book is designed to influence our reading experience—to enchant, enrage, delight, and disturb us—and our longstanding love affair with books in turn has had direct, momentous consequences across time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"All books are magic. All books have agency and power in the real world," writes Shakespeare scholar Smith (This Is Shakespeare) in this entertaining history. With a focus on "bookhood," which includes "the impact of touch, smell, and hearing, on the experience of books," Smith makes a colorful case that a book's form contains as much "magic" as its content. In a chapter on how a book becomes a classic, she points to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. The paperback of Carson's environmental manifesto made it available to a wide audience—the 40th anniversary edition, published in a "handsome" hardcover Library of America volume, confirmed it as a classic designed to last. A section on the popularity of paperbacks details how they were sent to soldiers during wartime, and a chapter on book burnings points out that the act is "powerfully symbolic and practically almost entirely ineffectual," plus reveals that through the destruction of unsold inventory, publishers themselves are the largest destroyers of books. With wit and verve, Smith concludes that a book becomes a book "in the hands of its readers... a book that is not handled and read is not really a book at all." Readers should make space on their shelves for this dazzling and provocative study.
