Emma Smith's Portable Magic has been on my reading list for months and I finally got hold of it this past week. I have listened to her podcast on Shakespeare many times and so I was eagerly awaiting this book and it didn't disappoint. Just like her lectures she raises thought-provoking questions about books for the reader to ponder over. The subtitle for this wonderful book says "A History of Books and their Readers" and that in a nutshell is what the book is about. It borrows the title from Stephen King's famous statement "Books are a uniquely portable magic" and as Emma Smith elaborates it is not just the content but the form that makes books unique - a form that has remained practically unchanged for millennia. In the introduction she says that her goal is to help her readers appreciate "book giss, the bookhood of (y)our own life and library" and I can certainly say it did for me! The book is a collection of essays and they are full of interesting facts and anecdotes.
Smith opens her essays with Gutenberg as it seems like a very good place to start but she is quick to point out that, "seen from a global perspective the question about Gutenberg seems less, "How did you do it?" and more "What took you so long?"." Chinese and Korean print pioneers preceded Gutenberg by many centuries but the Gutenberg myth is firmly enshrined in our minds and is said to mark a turning point for book culture at least in the western world. It was interesting to note it wasn't the Bibles but his anti-Turkish material following the wars with the Ottomans that opened the floodgates and drove the demand for print technology across Europe.
Another war a few centuries later provided a boost for popular books. During the Second World War American infantrymen were given books to take along with them into the battlefield to read in the trenches. This created a new format called the American Services Edition which served as a forerunner for the modern paperback - cheap editions of non didactic, non controversial books. Apparently without this edition, The Great Gatsby would have never become the classic it is today. Following the end of the war, books became a tool of Cold War, Anti-Communist propaganda - to spread western values of freedom and democracy in Germany and France.
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| ASE The Great Gatsby |
Books have always been part of a “strategic self-presentation” and while this was true for countries it is also true for us as individuals. Smith talks about the pandemic trend of using bookcases as zoom backgrounds to signal erudition. She has an interesting piece about “shelfies” and uses three women as examples. Unfortunately she didn’t have any images in her book but here are the three images and they say a lot about the person and how they wanted to be perceived by the world. In the painting of Lady Anne Clifford we see her with books at different stages of her life and every book is painted in detail and is not simply a filler.
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| The Great Picture by Lady Anne Clifford |
In Boucher’s painting of Madame Pompadour we see how the mistress of Louis XV is portraying herself as an intelligent woman, a true reader with an impressive collection of books and then we have the photograph of Marilyn Monroe reading perhaps the most difficult modern book ever. What is she trying to communicate? Is she like those celebrities who have had their zoom backgrounds curated by professionals or is she truly reading Molly’s soliloquy? Maybe what you infer says something about you rather than her.
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| Boucher's Madame Pompadour |
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| Monroe reading Ulysses |
Another fascinating essay was about books as diasporic objects and what happens when objects are removed from their place of origin and should they be repatriated. From Bacon’s Essaies that drowned along with the Titanic to the Kennicott Bible that traveled along with expelled Jews from Spain to Bibles carried by modern migrants documented by Tom Kiefer’s magnificent photographs, books seem to be quintessential diasporic objects with portability being a primary factor for that. One of the key innovations towards portability was the development of the codex which was a huge improvement over scrolls and codex made the Bible truly portable. She describes the conflict surrounding the Codex Sinaiticus (331 CE) which was taken from its monastery by a German scholar and ended up with Stalin who sold it to the British Library to raise funds for his 5 year plan. Does the Codex need to be repatriated? A successful case of repatriation happened when Denmark returned the Poetic Edda Saga to Iceland.
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| Tom Kiefer El Sueno Americano |
There are a number of other interesting essays that focus on how books are anthropomorphized and even a section on anthropodermic binding which is the practice of using human skin for binding (??!!). She also discusses book burnings and how they are associated with the Nazis and the May 1933 burnings. However, book burnings did not start or end with the Nazis. People have always been burning books in their private homes or in public as in the case of Cardinal Wolsey burning Luther’s books during the reign of Henry VIII. Following WWII the US issued a ban on a number of books including Mein Kampf and found itself in a tricky position. On the one hand the Nazis were portrayed as anti-freedom, book-burning fascists and on the other the Allied countries were banning books that didn't align with their values. We see this in modern America where a vocal minority is calling for banning books that don't align with their cultural values. What shocked me was also the publishing industry’s habit of pulping returned books. Unsold books all meet the same fate and apparently the British M6 highway’s noise absorbent layer is made from 2.5 Million copies of Mills and Boons novels!
The section on Empire Writes Back deals with colonialism and its impact on non-English cultures. Specifically she discusses Puritan New England and the zeal of John Eliot who arrived in the 1650s to spread the gospel among the Alongonquin tribes. Working with a native who was a first-language convert he created the first Wopanaak Bible. These Bibles were used to establish praying towns in New England which led to the elimination of Algonquin cultures. One such Bible owned by a native man named Ponampam shows how he straddled his indigenous culture with that of the settlers. These Bibles are now used by the Wampanoag linguists to aid their language reclamation project.
Finally Emma Smith asks us to consider what a book is and why we have an attachment to this object. As I type up this blogpost I look around my own room and see books everywhere. Some of them I have read multiple times and some have not been opened at all and haunt me in my nightmares! I love the kindle and find it convenient when on travel and to read in bed but I still long for the physical book especially if it is beautifully illustrated or if the subject matter is too complicated. I lost nearly all of my late father’s books during a move but managed to salvage his copy of A History of Modern Times which he received as an award during his B.A. - one of the very few objects of his that I own, but have never read.
Well written! As someone who is surrounded by books and book readers but never ever having been one unless it is academic or non fictional, the things you write about were very informative and relatable to other things I have heard from book lovers in my life!
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