Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers

by Emma Smith

Overview

A history of one of humankind’s most resilient and influential technologies over the past millennium—the book. Revelatory and entertaining in equal measure, Portable Magic will charm and challenge literature lovers of all kinds as it illuminates the transformative power and eternal appeal of the written word.

Stephen King once said that books are “a uniquely portable magic.” Here, Emma Smith takes readers on a literary adventure that spans centuries and circles the globe to uncover the reasons behind our obsession with this captivating object.

From disrupting the Western myth that the Gutenberg Press was the original printing project, to the decorative gift books that radicalized women to join the anti-slavery movement, to paperbacks being weaponized during World War II, to a book made entirely of plastic-wrapped slices of American cheese, Portable Magic explores how, when, and why books became so iconic. It’s not just the content within a book that compels; it’s the physical material itself, what Smith calls “bookhood”: the smell, the feel of the pages, the margins to scribble in, the illustrations on the jacket, its solid heft. Every book is designed to influence our reading experience—to enchant, enrage, delight, and disturb us—and our longstanding love affair with books in turn has had direct, momentous consequences across time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781524749101
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/15/2022
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	240,865
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

EMMA SMITH is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford University, and the author of This Is Shakespeare (2020). She lives in Oxford, England.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction:
Magic books

There was once a very learned man in the north-country who knew all the languages under the sun, and who was acquainted with all the mysteries of creation. He had one big book bound in black calf and clasped with iron, and with iron corners, and chained to a table which was made fast to the floor; and when he read out of this book, he unlocked it with an iron key, and none but he read from it, for it contained all the secrets of the spiritual world.

This is the opening to the folktale “The Master and His Pupil,” first printed in English at the end of the nineteenth century but circulating long before. Even though you probably haven’t read it, it may well seem familiar (that’s pretty much the definition of a folktale). And when you read the start of the next paragraph—“Now the master had a pupil who was but a foolish lad”—it is probably clear already what will happen. This is a version of the sorcerer’s apprentice tale, and the pupil will take his place in a line of hapless book handlers from Victor Frankenstein to Harry Potter. Like them, he will stumble into read aloud inadvertently from, or otherwise mishandle this magic book, with terrible consequences. 

Sure enough, the boy opens the book, which has been left unlocked by the master. As he reads from its red-and-black printed pages, there is a clap of thunder. The room darkens. Before him there appears “a horrible, horrible form, breathing fire and with eyes like burning lamps. It was the demon Beelzebub, whom he had called up to serve him.” Asked by this terrifying apparition to set him to a task, the pupil panics. In a strangely domestic moment, he asks the demon to water a potted geranium. The demon complies, but he repeats the action over and over, until the house is awash, “and would have drowned all Yorkshire.” The master returns in the nick of time, to speak the countercharm that sends the demon back into the pages of the book.

In the massive compendium of folklore motifs com-piled by the American folklorist Stith Thompson in the early twentieth century, this story type is traced across various European languages. Categorized as D, “Magic”: subsection 1421.1.3: “magic book summons genie,” its exemplars across many centuries range from Icelandic to Lithuanian traditions. Each of these iterations shares an outline. A magical or powerful book is kept under the control of a learned man— a minister, magician, or scholar. While he is temporarily absent, some unskilled person in his household—a child, servant, or friend—finds the book and accidentally summons a devil.

The story captures a widespread fear that books are powerful and dangerous in the wrong hands. What makes the master the master, and the pupil the pupil, is their ept or inept use of the book: it is the object that secures their relative positions. It is an active agent of social differentiation, conferring status upon its handler. This is absolutely not a parable of books as democratic objects, available to all. Once the pupil can manipulate the book of knowledge eff ectively, he will become the master. But this is exactly what makes the book a potential disruptor of social hierarchies.

Anxieties about books’ disruptive power had begun to intensify in the sixteenth century: in one early version of the story, performed for a culture newly enamored of the products of mechanical printing, an intellectually restless scholar uses them as go-betweens in his conversation with devils, swapping infernal knowledge for an immortal soul. In this, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus departed from its predecessors in German folklore: the original Faustian pact traded directly with the devil. But Marlowe was speaking to the Renaissance world of knowledge created by the printing press, which had made books more present, more prevalent, and more liable to fall into the wrong hands (that Faust, or Fust, was also the name of Johannes Gutenberg’s business partner in his print shop may be a coincidence, but it is a delicious one).

The sense of books’ shadowy magic continued to accrue force as the printing press compounded its cultural dominance. Glossing “The Master and His Pupil" in his 1890 compilation of English Fairy Tales, folklor-ist Joseph Jacobs suggests that the magician’s spell has “long been used for raising the ——”: his omission of the word “devil” reveals that he, like the learned man in the North Country, is invested in the power of the printed word. Jacobs’s book, which was also responsible for popularizing such familiar stories as Tom Thumb, Dick Whittington, the Three Little Pigs, and Jack and the Beanstalk, is implied to possess the power of the sorcerer’s book of magic: the reader is advised “not [to] read the lines out when alone,” since “one never knows what may happen."

Table of Contents

Introduction: Magic books 1

1 Beginnings: East, West, and Gutenberg 21

2 Queen Victoria in the trenches 38

3 Christmas, gift books, and abolition 55

4 Shelfies: Anne, Marilyn, and Madame de Pompadour 73

5 Silent Spring and the making of a classic 90

6 The Titanic and book traffic 105

7 Religions of the book 121

8 May 10, 1933: burning books 135

9 Library books, camp, and malicious damage 152

10 Censored books: "237 goddams, 58 bastards, 31 Chrissakes, and 1 fart" 169

11 Mew Kampf: freedom to publish? 189

12 Talismanic books 205

13 Skin in the game: bookbinding and African American poetry 224

14 Choose Your Own Adventure: readers' work 243

15 The empire writes back 261

16 What is a book? 276

Epilogue: Books and transformation 294

Notes 299

Acknowledgments 313

Index 315

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/22/2022

“All books are magic. All books have agency and power in the real world,” writes Shakespeare scholar Smith (This Is Shakespeare) in this entertaining history. With a focus on “bookhood,” which includes “the impact of touch, smell, and hearing, on the experience of books,” Smith makes a colorful case that a book’s form contains as much “magic” as its content. In a chapter on how a book becomes a classic, she points to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. The paperback of Carson’s environmental manifesto made it available to a wide audience—the 40th anniversary edition, published in a “handsome” hardcover Library of America volume, confirmed it as a classic designed to last. A section on the popularity of paperbacks details how they were sent to soldiers during wartime, and a chapter on book burnings points out that the act is “powerfully symbolic and practically almost entirely ineffectual,” plus reveals that through the destruction of unsold inventory, publishers themselves are the largest destroyers of books. With wit and verve, Smith concludes that a book becomes a book “in the hands of its readers... a book that is not handled and read is not really a book at all.” Readers should make space on their shelves for this dazzling and provocative study. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

An enthralling, timely, and spirited tour through the history of the book… Powerful… Portable Magic brims with insights, causing its reader to feel as though it might at any moment burst forth from its binding… A remarkable reminder of how books bear witness to their own histories — as well as, in various senses, those of their readers.”
—Daniel Blank, Los Angeles Review of Books

“A delightful examination of the symbol and meaning behind physical texts, for people who love books... [Smith] argues convincingly, a book is never just a book. And perhaps that's why despite a decade of premature obituaries, books are alive as ever."
—Randy Rosenthal, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Long after details of plot, character, and setting have vanished from memory, the sensual traces of a book’s paper, typeface, and binding linger... Emma Smith wants us to focus on the materiality of those packages of ink squiggles that inform, amuse, annoy, and inspire us... While she revels in the dazzling variety of physical objects we can call books, Smith also cautions against ‘a curious overinvestment in the book as a sacred object.’ Her own breezy book is meant not to be collected but to be read.”
—Steven G. Kellman, The American Scholar

"A lively and engaging survey... Covers an impressive amount of ground... Though Portable Magic reflects the work of a careful scholar, it will delight the thoughtful general reader. Any bibliophile will come away from it with a renewed appreciation for books and the central role they still play in our lives."
—BookPage

“Smith’s work is a delight for bibliophiles, historians, and curious readers craving an unconventional piece of nonfiction... The author’s trenchant analysis, attention to detail, and conversational tone combine to make a page-turning historical study... A fascinating material history of the book told through a geopolitical lens.”
—Kirkus

“Entertaining… With wit and verve, Smith concludes that a book becomes a book ‘in the hands of its readers... a book that is not handled and read is not really a book at all.’ Readers should make space on their shelves for this dazzling and provocative study.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred 

"Amusing, informative and reverential, Portable Magic is an invitation to dwell on and celebrate the book in its physical form, resulting in nothing short of a reader's delight... Razor-sharp... All this is done with a conversational levity that is both beguiling and surprising: I did not expect to be laughing out loud at this book...  Portable Magic is so well-written that you'll be itching to mark up multiple lines."
—BookBrowse

UK Praise

A Guardian and The Times Best Summer Read

"Alive in equal measure to the magic and the badness of books, Smith... charts the both the history of the book itself and the history of our relationship with it in all its equivocality... Anyone who picked up Smith’s excellent This Is Shakespeare will be familiar with the combination of deep scholarship and down-to-earth wit she brings to her subjects, and Portable Magic continues in the same charming vein. Applying the same methods to a much broader topic with similarly engaging effect, Smith proceeds here with enviable lightness of touch, mingling the serious and the silly as she goes... Rather brilliant."
—Tim Smith-Laing, The Telegraph (UK)

"Brilliantly written… Joyful… Smith reminds us of the thrills and spills of shabby covers, the illicit delight of writing in margins when you have been told not to and the guilty joy that comes from poring over traces left by someone else. It is these haptic, visceral and even slightly seedy pleasures of ‘bookhood’ that she brings so brilliantly to life.” 
—Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian (UK)

“Wildly entertaining… Smith deals smartly with serious questions… This fascinating, slyly amusing book carries an undertow of personal affection for the curious, rectangular, multileaved objects with which we’re so familiar."
—John Walsh, The Sunday Times (UK) 

"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 (UK)

From the Publisher

2022-08-23
A critical look at trends in printing and book production as they relate to world history.

Smith, a professor of Shakespeare studies at Oxford and author of This Is Shakespeare, begins by examining various motivations for the mass distribution of books. These have ranged from the nefarious desires of European powers to further their imperialist, colonial agendas and disseminate propaganda to the radical desires of abolitionist societies to spread anti-slavery messages to women—and raise money for abolitionist causes—through the distribution of abolitionist texts disguised as the predecessors of Christmas-themed women’s literature. The development of the paperback, writes Smith, was directly related to the free distribution of Armed Services Editions to Americans serving abroad in the years during and after World War II. These cheaply stapled but durable books popularized such titles as The Great Gatsby, which, though now iconic, was not widely read before its inclusion in the Armed Services collection. This initiative led to printing methods that assured the affordability of texts like Silent Spring, and that book’s widespread distribution helped spur the modern environmental movement. Smith also overturns common myths about literary history, most notably the idea that Gutenberg created the first printing press. “Chinese and Korean pioneers of print predated Gutenberg by centuries,” writes the author, “and the relatively low cost of bamboo-fiber paper in East Asia meant that early print was a less elite technology in these regions. Chinese print technology developed movable type.” The author’s trenchant analysis, attention to detail, and conversational tone combine to make a page-turning historical study. At times, though, the rapid narrative pace becomes frustrating, as the author skips rapidly through trends—e.g., abolitionist book sales—that warrant more space. Nonetheless, Smith’s work is a delight for bibliophiles, historians, and curious readers craving an unconventional piece of nonfiction.

A fascinating material history of the book told through a geopolitical lens.

Kirkus Reviews