| Books -- History |
| Books and reading -- History. |
| Book industries and trade -- History. |
| Books -- Anecdotes. |
| Books and reading -- Anecdotes. |
| Appraisal of books |
| Books -- Appraisal |
| Choice of books |
| Evaluation of literature |
| Literature -- Evaluation |
| Reading, Choice of |
| Reading and books |
| Reading habits |
| Reading public |
| Book trade |
Available:
Library | Shelf Number | Shelf Location | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Elizabeth Taber Library | 002.09 SMI | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Foxboro - Boyden Library | 002.09 SMITH | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Norton Public Library | 028.9 SMI 2022 | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Pembroke Public Library | 002.09 SMI | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
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.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
"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. (Nov.)
Guardian Review
One of the most familiar visual tropes to emerge from the pandemic has been that of Serious People seated in front of their bookshelves. Whether it's a cabinet minister on television or an accountant working from home, the poetics of Zoom insist on a backdrop of titles composed of equal parts stuffy professional manual, well?thumbed Penguin Classic and, for those who like to raise the stakes, last year's International Booker prize shortlist. Books don't just furnish a room, they semaphore to the world exactly how you yourself would like to be read. In this brilliantly written account of the book-as-material-object, Emma Smith explains that people have been posing in front of their libraries ever since Gutenberg started cranking up the printing press. Before, in fact: one of her earliest revelations is that people in China and Korea were printing books several centuries before sluggish northern Europe got round to it. Still, one of the most deft proponents of the early "shelfie" was Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, also known as Madame de Pompadour, companion of Louis XV. In the 1750s, when Jeanne was making the tricky move from maîtresse-en-titre to femme savante, she enrolled her favourite painter, François Boucher, to manage the transformation. From now on he was to paint her either against a backdrop of crammed bookshelves or, better still, actually reading a book and looking thoughtful about it. Boucher was careful to give bookish Jeanne the same creamy décolletage and luscious sweep of a silk gown that featured in her early publicity portraits, on the grounds that there was no reason why a woman couldn't be clever and sexy too. It was a message that Marilyn Monroe took to heart when in 1955 she posed for the famous photograph taken by Eve Arnold, in which she wears a swimsuit while absorbed in Ulysses, a novel often described as unreadable. The following year Monroe would marry playwright Arthur Miller, prompting Variety's famous headline: "Egghead Weds Hourglass". Monroe's "shelfie", then, functions along similar lines to Madame de Pompadour's careful self-staging as she transitions from pin-up to public intellectual. In Portable Magic - the phrase is borrowed from Stephen King - Smith's subject is the materiality of reading, or what she calls "bookhood". Books in their physical form turn out to be endlessly adaptable, not just in the domestic space as doorstops, yoga blocks, and occasional kindling when times are tough, but out in the world too. In the first world war, pocket-sized Bibles were clad in full metal jackets in the hope that, carried close to the heart, they might save a soldier from enemy fire while also saving his soul. More mundane is the revelation that, at the beginning of this century, fragments of some 2.5m copies of Mills & Boon novels were used to create an absorbent, noise-reducing layer for surfacing the M6 toll motorway in the Midlands. This, though, should not be taken as a comment on commercial romantic fiction: Smith reminds us that being turned into substratum, or something like it, is the fate of most books, high or low. Her own publisher, the esteemed Penguin Random House, runs a large "centralised returns processing site" in Essex which shreds, crushes and bales around 25,000 of its own books every single day. More joyous altogether is Smith's retelling of the creative intervention perpetrated by Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell on their library books in the late 1950s and early 60s. Each week the men would take out the lustreless novels available from their local Islington branch and spend the intervening weeks snipping out the cover images and patching them up with something surreal before returning the books for circulation. Phyllis Hambledon's 1960 bodice ripper, Queen's Favourite, had its cover repurposed so that, instead of a young wasp-waisted woman in a ruff, the main figures were now two bare-chested male wrestlers. In a study of John Betjeman the photograph of the straw-hatted poet was replaced with one of a pot-bellied and heavily tattooed man in his underpants. Orton and Halliwell also had their way with blurbs, so that the inside flap for Gaudy Nights hailed Dorothy L Sayers "at her most queer, and needless to say, at her most crude!" Smith reads Orton and Halliwell's actions as a kind of queer performance art. They were not vandals or, at least, that is not all they were. The books they roughed up were mass-produced and easily replaced - this was not the literary equivalent of drawing moustaches on old masters. Rather, the men were engaged in a protest against the relentlessly middle-brow, heteronormative pap on offer to the citizens of Islington. Within a couple of years, Orton wrote Loot and Entertaining Mr Sloane, the avant garde plays that shook up a British theatre that was already bored with the kitchen sink dramas of the late 1950s. Still, Orton believed that the reason he and Halliwell were sentenced to six months' imprisonment was because they were gay at a time when homosexuality was illegal. The Daily Express reported, on the same page as the Orton-Halliwell book trial, that a drunken driver who had killed his passenger received the same sentence as the book vandals of Essex Road. When the muddle-headed puritans worried about the "poison" that Orton and Halliwell were releasing into the body politic they were drawing on ancient terrors about the book as a vector of disease. As late as 1907, public health authorities decreed that any volume from a household recently visited by smallpox, cholera or tuberculosis should be disinfected, if not destroyed, for fear that it might carry contamination far and wide. Smith is quick to see a parallel here with the early days of the pandemic, when government guidelines warned that books that had been bought online should be quarantined for 72 hours before being deemed safe to handle. How thrilling, then, to learn that this principle can also work the other way round. Smith explains that ancient volumes are now being harvested for accumulated DNA - skin cells and traces of nasal mucus from sneezes - left behind by early readers. At one level this allows us to glimpse people from the past as they lean over a particular volume: the detritus from a 1637 American Bible recently revealed the DNA of a northern European reader who suffered from acne. More therapeutically, plans are in play to swab old books to gather genetic material that predates modern medical problems such as antibiotic resistance. Portable Magic is a love song to the book as a physical object. In tactile prose Smith reminds us of the thrills and spills of shabby covers, the illicit delight of writing in margins when you have been told not to and the guilty joy that comes from poring over traces left by someone else. It is these haptic, visceral and even slightly seedy pleasures of "bookhood" that she brings so brilliantly to life.
Kirkus Review
A critical look at trends in printing and book production as they relate to world history. Smith, a professor of Shakespeare studies at Oxford and author of This Is Shakespeare, begins by examining various motivations for the mass distribution of books. These have ranged from the nefarious desires of European powers to further their imperialist, colonial agendas and disseminate propaganda to the radical desires of abolitionist societies to spread anti-slavery messages to women--and raise money for abolitionist causes--through the distribution of abolitionist texts disguised as the predecessors of Christmas-themed women's literature. The development of the paperback, writes Smith, was directly related to the free distribution of Armed Services Editions to Americans serving abroad in the years during and after World War II. These cheaply stapled but durable books popularized such titles as The Great Gatsby, which, though now iconic, was not widely read before its inclusion in the Armed Services collection. This initiative led to printing methods that assured the affordability of texts like Silent Spring, and that book's widespread distribution helped spur the modern environmental movement. Smith also overturns common myths about literary history, most notably the idea that Gutenberg created the first printing press. "Chinese and Korean pioneers of print predated Gutenberg by centuries," writes the author, "and the relatively low cost of bamboo-fiber paper in East Asia meant that early print was a less elite technology in these regions. Chinese print technology developed movable type." The author's trenchant analysis, attention to detail, and conversational tone combine to make a page-turning historical study. At times, though, the rapid narrative pace becomes frustrating, as the author skips rapidly through trends--e.g., abolitionist book sales--that warrant more space. Nonetheless, Smith's work is a delight for bibliophiles, historians, and curious readers craving an unconventional piece of nonfiction. A fascinating material history of the book told through a geopolitical lens. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
From exploding the myth that Gutenberg's press was the world's first printing venture to clarifying the role books played in encouraging women to join the abolitionist movement and battling World War II, Smith's narrative aims to show how, when, and why books became so important. An interesting aside: Oxford Shakespeare scholar Smith took her title from Stephen King.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Introduction: Magic books There was once a very learned man in the north- country who knew all the languages under the sun, and who was acquainted with all the mysteries of creation. He had one big book bound in black calf and clasped with iron, and with iron corners, and chained to a table which was made fast to the fl oor; and when he read out of this book, he unlocked it with an iron key, and none but he read from it, for it contained all the secrets of the spiritual world. This is the opening to the folktale "The Master and His Pupil," fi rst printed in En glish at the end of the nine-teenth century but circulating long before. Even though you probably haven't read it, it may well seem familiar (that's pretty much the defi nition of a folktale). And when you read the start of the next paragraph-- "Now the master had a pupil who was but a foolish lad"-- it is probably clear already what will happen. This is a version of the sorcerer's apprentice tale, and the pupil will take his place in a line of hapless book handlers from Victor Frankenstein to Harry Potter. Like them, he will stumble into read aloud inadvertently from, or otherwise mis-handle this magic book, with terrible consequences. Sure enough, the boy opens the book, which has been left unlocked by the master. As he reads from its red- and- black printed pages, there is a clap of thunder. The room darkens. Before him there appears "a hor-rible, horrible form, breathing fi re and with eyes like burning lamps. It was the demon Beelzebub, whom he had called up to serve him." Asked by this terrifying apparition to set him to a task, the pupil panics. In a strangely domestic moment, he asks the demon to water a potted geranium. The demon complies, but he repeats the action over and over, until the house is awash, "and would have drowned all Yorkshire." The master returns in the nick of time, to speak the countercharm that sends the demon back into the pages of the book. In the massive compendium of folklore motifs com-piled by the American folklorist Stith Thompson in the early twentieth century, this story type is traced across various European languages. Categorized as D, "Magic": subsection 1421.1.3: "magic book summons genie," its exemplars across many centuries range from Icelandic to Lithuanian traditions. Each of these iterations shares an outline. A magical or powerful book is kept under the control of a learned man-- a minister, magician, or scholar. While he is temporarily absent, some unskilled person in his household-- a child, servant, or friend-- finds the book and accidentally summons a devil. The story captures a widespread fear that books are powerful and dangerous in the wrong hands. What makes the master the master, and the pupil the pupil, is their ept or inept use of the book: it is the object that secures their relative positions. It is an active agent of social diff erentiation, conferring status upon its handler. This is absolutely not a parable of books as democratic objects, available to all. Once the pupil can manipulate the book of knowledge eff ectively, he will become the master. But this is exactly what makes the book a poten-tial disruptor of social hierarchies. Anxieties about books' disruptive power had begun to intensify in the sixteenth century: in one early version of the story, performed for a culture newly enamored of the products of mechanical printing, an intellectually restless scholar uses them as go- betweens in his con-versation with devils, swapping infernal knowledge for an immortal soul. In this, Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus departed from its predecessors in German folk-lore: the original Faustian pact traded directly with the devil. But Marlowe was speaking to the Renaissance world of knowledge created by the printing press, which had made books more present, more prevalent, and more liable to fall into the wrong hands (that Faust, or Fust, was also the name of Johannes Gutenberg's busi-ness partner in his print shop may be a coincidence, but it is a delicious one). The sense of books' shadowy magic continued to accrue force as the printing press compounded its cul-tural dominance. Glossing "The Master and His Pupil" in his 1890 compilation of En glish Fairy Tales, folklor-ist Joseph Jacobs suggests that the magician's spell has "long been used for raising the ----": his omission of the word "devil" reveals that he, like the learned man in the North Country, is invested in the power of the printed word. Jacobs's book, which was also responsible for popularizing such familiar stories as Tom Thumb, Dick Whittington, the Three Little Pigs, and Jack and the Beanstalk, is implied to possess the power of the sorcerer's book of magic: the reader is advised "not [to] read the lines out when alone," since "one never knows what may happen." Excerpted from Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers by Emma Smith All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
| Introduction: Magic books | p. 1 |
| 1 Beginnings: East, West, and Gutenberg | p. 21 |
| 2 Queen Victoria in the trenches | p. 38 |
| 3 Christmas, gift books, and abolition | p. 55 |
| 4 Shelfies: Anne, Marilyn, and Madame de Pompadour | p. 73 |
| 5 Silent Spring and the making of a classic | p. 90 |
| 6 The Titanic and book traffic | p. 105 |
| 7 Religions of the book | p. 121 |
| 8 May 10, 1933: burning books | p. 135 |
| 9 Library books, camp, and malicious damage | p. 152 |
| 10 Censored books: "237 goddams, 58 bastards, 31 Chrissakes, and 1 fart" | p. 169 |
| 11 Mew Kampf: freedom to publish? | p. 189 |
| 12 Talismanic books | p. 205 |
| 13 Skin in the game: bookbinding and African American poetry | p. 224 |
| 14 Choose Your Own Adventure: readers' work | p. 243 |
| 15 The empire writes back | p. 261 |
| 16 What is a book? | p. 276 |
| Epilogue: Books and transformation | p. 294 |
| Notes | p. 299 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 313 |
| Index | p. 315 |