EAN: 9780241427262

PORTABLE MAGIC - EMMA SMITH GEBUNDEN

'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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