> Skip to content
Play sample
  • Published: 28 April 2022
  • ISBN: 9780241427286
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368

Portable Magic

Our Long Love Affair with Books




An excitingly revisionist history of bibliophilia, from the celebrated author of This is Shakespeare

'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.

  • Published: 28 April 2022
  • ISBN: 9780241427286
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368

About the author

Emma Smith

Professor Emma Smith is a lecturer in English at the University of Oxford, Professor of Shakespeare Studies, and a Fellow of Hertford College.

Also by Emma Smith

See all

Praise for Portable Magic

Praise for Emma Smith

Thought-provoking, fizzing with jokes ... Smith does it all with such a light touch you barely notice how much you're learning

Colin Burrow, Guardian

Brilliantly approachable and entertaining ... anarchic, counterintuitive, critical ... perfect

Alex Preston, Observer

Delightful ... beautifully judged, impeccably researched, yet wry and affectionate

Jerry Brotton, Financial Times

Quirky, brilliant, bracing

Daniel Swift, Spectator