Portable Magic is an exciting episodic history of the book in human hands. The following excerpt, extracted from the first chapter of the book, provides a glimpse into what you can expect from this book from Emma Smith.

An extract from Chapter 1 of Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers

A small band of survivors finds sanctuary in the Beaux Arts arcades of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. Outside, a flooded Manhattan is freezing solid in sudden sub-Arctic temperatures. Only the tip of the Statue of Liberty’s lamp and her pointed coronet are visible above the ice plains. Far away, politicians argue about their response to the climate catastrophe gripping the northern hemisphere: meanwhile, a grizzled climatologist in parka and snowshoes is trekking through epic cold to keep a promise to his teenage son.

The group ransacks the shelves for fuel to keep warm. Librarians make a vain attempt to protect their collections. A scuffle about the value of Nietzsche – most important nineteenth-century thinker or chauvinist pig in love with his sister? – is averted by the discovery of the tax law section, which all agree can be readily con- signed to the fire. The next crisis over resources comes when a librarian (cue buttoned-up duffel coat and heavy glasses screaming ‘book nerd’) refuses to surrender the large leather-bound volume he is clutching on his knees. The Gutenberg Bible. ‘Do you think God will save you?’ is the sarcastic retort. The man’s reply makes clear that it is not the scriptural contents he is clinging on to. Rather, he delivers an impromptu eulogy for the importance of this object as an artefact of human ingenuity and progress: ‘I’m protecting it. This bible is the first book ever printed. It represents the dawn of the age of reason. As far as I’m concerned, the written word is mankind’s greatest achievement. If western civilisation’s finished, I’m going to save at least one little piece of it.’ In a paradoxical symbolic twist, the NYPL copy of the Gutenberg Bible comes to represent something like the secular enlightenment, or even humanity itself.

The occasion for this heartfelt defence of a book amid a general bibliocide is Roland Emmerich’s climate-disaster movie, The Day after Tomorrow (2004). It seems like a throw-away vignette (and yes, of course they should have burned the chairs and shelves first, given how unsatisfactory books are as fuel) but is in fact a crucial plot pivot. Recognizing the value of this specific book redirects the film from a story of human helplessness in the face of nature to a celebration of human technology and resourceful- ness. Hero-dad and Gutenberg (often dubbed the ‘father of printing’) together secure humanity’s post-apocalyptic future, reassuring us that something important can survive Armageddon. But to understand the role of the Gutenberg Bible in larger narratives of books’ and human progress, we need to flesh out the film’s hyperbolic cultural and historical claims. Is this the beginning of our long love affair with books? Was this the first book ever printed? Does Gutenberg’s Bible represent ‘mankind’s greatest achievement’? And what is its relationship to ‘western civilisation’? As we’ll see, the answers to these questions are sometimes disobliging to cherished myths of origin, enmeshing the printed book within a larger, more combative and political narrative. It’s good to be reminded from the start that books – their production, their form and their content – are never neutral.