In Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers, Oxford University Shakespeare research professor Emma Smith affords a energetic and fascinating survey of the historical past of the e book, specializing in the “material combination of form and content” she calls “bookhood.” It’s a “book about books, rather than words,” that describes with each perception and affection the enduring energy of the e book as a bodily object.
Organized thematically (Smith even suggests the self-contained chapters might be learn in any order), Portable Magic covers a formidable quantity of floor with effectivity. The opening essay, on Gutenberg’s “invention” of movable sort within the fifteenth century, units the e book’s usually iconoclastic tone. Pointing out that this methodology was utilized in Asia nearly a century earlier than Gutenberg, Smith argues that the concept that print is a Western innovation is a delusion, invoked primarily within the service of European colonization.
In subsequent chapters, Smith ranges extensively throughout literary historical past, unafraid to specific sturdy opinions with out dogmatism. Some of the matters she takes on embody the historical past of paperback books and the practices of giving books as presents and e book amassing. In the latter, she tells the story of Harry Elkins Widener, a well known e book collector from Philadelphia who sank to the underside of the ocean with the Titanic, carrying a 1598 assortment of Francis Bacon’s essays in his pocket. Other essays take into account the depiction of books in works of artwork and the central position of spiritual scriptures, in addition to oddities like books certain in human pores and skin and the Seventeenth-century Venetian e book containing a small pistol that might be fired utilizing its silk bookmark.
Smith devotes a chapter to the topic of the destruction of books, too, noting that e book burning is “powerfully symbolic and practically almost entirely ineffectual.” The publishing enterprise’s observe of pulping books returned from retailers (some 30% to 40% of these shipped), she explains, has eradicated much more books than any conflagration. In two chapters, one centered completely on Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Smith opinions some of the contentious, and never all the time unambiguous, points surrounding free expression and censorship.
Though Portable Magic displays the work of a cautious scholar, it would delight the considerate common reader. Any bibliophile will come away from it with a renewed appreciation for books and the central position they nonetheless play in our lives.
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