City of Stirling Library Services

Portable magic, a history of books and their readers, Emma Smith

eng

no index present

non fiction

Portable magic

Emma Smith

a history of books and their readers

Most of what we say about books is really about their contents, 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'. Portable Magic unfurls an exciting, iconoclastic and ambitious new story of the book in human hands, exploring when, why and how it acquired its particular hold over humankind. Gathering together a millennium's worth of pivotal encounters with volumes big and small, Smith argues that, as much as their contents, it is books' physical form their 'bookhood' that lends them their distinctive and sometimes dangerous magic

adult