'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 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.
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