PORTABLE MAGIC: A HISTORY OF BOOKS AND THEIR READERS
By Emma Smith
Synopsis
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 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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| Narrator | Emma Smith |
|---|---|
| Length | 8hrs 30mins |
| Catalogue No. | 15592 |
| Publisher | Penguin Audio; 2022 |
