{"product_id":"portable-magic-isbn-9781524749095","title":"Portable Magic","description":"\u003cb\u003eA history of one of humankind’s most resilient and influential technologies over the past millennium—the book. Revelatory and entertaining in equal measure, \u003ci\u003ePortable Magic\u003c\/i\u003e will charm and challenge literature lovers of all kinds as it illuminates the transformative power and eternal appeal of the written word.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStephen 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom 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, \u003ci\u003ePortable Magic\u003c\/i\u003e 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.“An enthralling, timely, and spirited tour through the history of the book… Powerful…  \u003ci\u003ePortable Magic\u003c\/i\u003e 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.”\u003cbr\u003e—Daniel Blank, \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Review of Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“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.\"\u003cbr\u003e—Randy Rosenthal, \u003ci\u003eMinneapolis Star Tribune\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“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.”\u003cbr\u003e—Steven G. Kellman, \u003ci\u003eThe American Scholar\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A lively and engaging survey... Covers an impressive amount of ground... Though \u003ci\u003ePortable Magic\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eBookPage\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eKirkus\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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.”\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Publishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e, starred \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Amusing, informative and reverential, \u003ci\u003ePortable Magic\u003c\/i\u003e 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...  \u003ci\u003ePortable Magic\u003c\/i\u003e is so well-written that you'll be itching to mark up multiple lines.\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eBookBrowse\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUK Praise\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA \u003ci\u003eGuardian \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Times\u003c\/i\u003e Best Summer Read\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"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 \u003ci\u003eThis Is Shakespeare\u003c\/i\u003e will be familiar with the combination of deep scholarship and down-to-earth wit she brings to her subjects, and\u003ci\u003e Portable Magic\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\"\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e—Tim Smith-Laing,\u003ci\u003e The Telegraph \u003c\/i\u003e(UK)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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.” \u003cbr\u003e—Kathryn Hughes, \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian \u003c\/i\u003e(UK)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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.\"\u003cbr\u003e—John Walsh, \u003ci\u003eThe Sunday Times \u003c\/i\u003e(UK) \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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.\"\u003cbr\u003e—Val McDermid, \u003ci\u003eThe Times \u003c\/i\u003e(UK)EMMA SMITH is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford University, and the author of \u003ci\u003eThis Is Shakespeare \u003c\/i\u003e(2020). She lives in Oxford, England.Introduction: \u003cbr\u003eMagic books\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis 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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSure  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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnxieties  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).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe  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.\"","brand":"Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305294778597,"sku":"NP9781524749095","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781524749095.jpg?v=1767734985","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/portable-magic-isbn-9781524749095","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}