‘Portable Magic:
A History of Books and their Readers’
Emma Smith
Allen Lane
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.
Ultimately, Portable Magic illuminates the ways in which our relationship with the written word is more reciprocal – and more turbulent – than we tend to imagine.
About the author
Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College.
- Anyone who loves books will enjoy this one. Witty and wise, it delves into the magic of books and the stories across time of the people who read and write them.
Wolfson History Prize judges
