Portable magic A history of books and their readers

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

"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.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Library Journal Review

From exploding the myth that Gutenberg's press was the world's first printing venture to clarifying the role books played in encouraging women to join the abolitionist movement and battling World War II, Smith's narrative aims to show how, when, and why books became so important. An interesting aside: Oxford Shakespeare scholar Smith took her title from Stephen King.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---

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 fl oor; 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," fi rst printed in En glish at the end of the nine-teenth century but circulating long before. Even though you probably haven't read it, it may well seem familiar (that's pretty much the defi nition 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 mis-handle 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 hor-rible, horrible form, breathing fi re 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 diff erentiation, 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 poten-tial 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 con-versation with devils, swapping infernal knowledge for an immortal soul. In this, Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus departed from its predecessors in German folk-lore: 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 busi-ness 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 cul-tural dominance. Glossing "The Master and His Pupil" in his 1890 compilation of En glish 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." Excerpted from Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers by Emma Smith All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---