Portable Magic by Emma Smith

My review

3/5 stars

This book does what it says on the tin - it is a look at the way humans have interacted with books throughout time, and the impact they have had on the collective human psyche.

The author covered many aspects of booklore, including their importance in religion, their identity as status symbols and their importance on human interaction, but I found that the chapter on anthropodermic books (books bound in human skin) to be the most eerily fascinating - it is the one that has stuck with me most post-read.

While I wasn't expecting light reading, I was caught off-guard by the heavy, deeply intellectual nature of the writing by this author. I managed to keep pace, but having it be so dissertation-like detracted from my engagement with the content, despite listening to it in audiobook format (I imagine, giving it a lighter feel than reading from the page).

Interesting, but hard-going.

Book blurb

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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You can buy the book here now. It was published by Allen Lane.

For more on the author, you can check out her Goodreads page.