Portable Magic Synopsis
Most of what we say about books is really about the words inside them: the rosy nostalgic glow for childhood reading, the lifetime companionship of a much-loved novel. But books are things as well as words, objects in our lives as well as worlds in our heads. And just as we crack their spines, loosen their leaves and write in their margins, so they disrupt and disorder us in turn.
All books are, as Stephen King put it, 'a uniquely portable magic'. Here, Emma Smith shows us why. Portable Magic unfurls an exciting and iconoclastic new story of the book in human hands, exploring when, why and how it acquired its particular hold over us.
Gathering together a millennium's worth of pivotal encounters with volumes big and small, Smith reveals that, as much as their contents, it is books' physical form - their 'bookhood' - that lends them their distinctive and sometimes dangerous magic. From the Diamond Sutra to Jilly Cooper's Riders, to a book made of wrapped slices of cheese, this composite artisanal object has, for centuries, embodied and extended relationships between readers, nations, ideologies and cultures, in significant and unpredictable ways. Exploring the unexpected and unseen consequences of our love affair with books, Portable Magic hails the rise of the mass-market paperback, and dismantles the myth that print began with Gutenberg; it reveals how our reading habits have been shaped by American soldiers, and proposes new definitions of a 'classic'-and even of the book itself.
Ultimately, it illuminates the ways in which our relationship with the written word is more reciprocal - and more turbulent - than we tend to imagine.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9780141991931 |
| Publication date: |
27th April 2023 |
| Author: |
Emma Smith |
| Publisher: |
Penguin Books Ltd |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
352 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Gift Books
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| Other Genres: |
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Emma Smith Press Reviews
'If you love books, you'll love Portable Magic' -- Val McDermid
'For many of us, books are the life we chose without thinking about it too much. Emma Smith's terrifically knowledgeable and thoughtful Portable Magic helps us understand every aspect of what our beloved books stand for. I for one am very grateful. What a delight this book is.' -- Lynne Truss
'Irresistibly fascinating' -- John Carey
'Brilliant... amusing, darkly sobering, and consistently fascinating ... a combination of deep scholarship and down-to-earth wit' - Telegraph
'Fun, playful, learned and accessible... Smith is herself a magical writer' - BBC History Magazine
'Smith's genius is to question as well as to value and register every contradiction - to make you, the reader, think without even suspecting that you are ... for communicating complex material in conversational, occasionally irreverent, prose' -- Lucasta Miller - The Critic
'Joyous ... thrilling ... A brilliantly written account of the book-as-material-object, and the slightly seedy pleasures of bookhood -- Kathryn Hughes' - Guardian (Book of the Week)
'Wildly entertaining ... This fascinating, slyly amusing book carries an undertow of personal affection for the curious, rectangular, multileaved objects with which we're so familiar' - Sunday Times
'Smith's enchanting book sparkles with gems of trivia that often conceal deeper truths about the evolution of reading and publishing. Fascinating, enlightening, funny and touching, this is indeed portable magic' - Sydney Morning Herald
'Emma Smith's history of the physical book is a thing to cherish ... witty and ingenious ... Smith reads with all her senses alert ... A wise, funny, endearingly personal book' -- Peter Conrad - Observer
'Anyone who's ever enjoyed the feel or indeed smell of a book should read Emma Smith's delightful and informative Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers' -- Lucasta Miller - Spectator Books of the Year
From bullet-stopping Bibles to tomes bound in human skin, Smith's history of books revels in their magic and malignity. It skewers our faith in the written word yet repays it handsomely - Telegraph
'A fascinating journey into our relationship with the physical book...I lost count of the times I exclaimed with delight when I read a nugget of information I hadn't encountered before' -- Val McDermid, The Times
About Emma Smith
Emma Smith was born Elspeth Hallsmith in 1923. Maidens' Trip was first published in 1948 and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. The Far Cry, a novel, was published the following year and was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 1951 Emma Smith married and moved to Wales, where she published children's books, short stories and, in 1978, her novel The Opportunity of a Lifetime. In 2008 The Great Western Beach, her memoir of her Cornish childhood, was published. Since 1980 Emma Smith has lived in the London district of Putney.
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