- Published: 28 April 2022
- ISBN: 9780241595718
- Imprint: Penguin Audio
- Format: Audio Download
- RRP: $30.00
Portable Magic
Our Long Love Affair with Books
- Published: 28 April 2022
- ISBN: 9780241595718
- Imprint: Penguin Audio
- Format: Audio Download
- RRP: $30.00
If you love books, you'll love Portable Magic
Val McDermid
For many of us, books are the life we chose without thinking about it too much. Emma Smith's terrifically knowledgeable and thoughtful Portable Magic helps us understand every aspect of what our beloved books stand for. I for one am very grateful. What a delight this book is.
Lynne Truss
Irresistibly fascinating
John Carey
Wildly entertaining ... This fascinating, slyly amusing book carries an undertow of personal affection for the curious, rectangular, multileaved objects with which we're so familiar
Sunday Times
Fun, playful, learned and accessible... Smith is herself a magical writer
BBC History Magazine
Joyous ... thrilling ... A brilliantly written account of the book-as-material-object, and the slightly seedy pleasures of "bookhood"
Kathryn Hughes, Guardian (Book of the Week)
Smith's genius is to question as well as to value and register every contradiction - to make you, the reader, think without even suspecting that you are ... for communicating complex material in conversational, occasionally irreverent, prose
Lucasta Miller, The Critic
Brilliant... amusing, darkly sobering, and consistently fascinating ... a combination of deep scholarship and down-to-earth wit
Telegraph
Smith's enchanting book sparkles with gems of trivia that often conceal deeper truths about the evolution of reading and publishing. Fascinating, enlightening, funny and touching, this is indeed portable magic
Sydney Morning Herald
Emma Smith's history of the physical book is a thing to cherish ... witty and ingenious ... Smith reads with all her senses alert ... A wise, funny, endearingly personal book
Peter Conrad, Observer
Anyone who's ever enjoyed the feel or indeed smell of a book should read Emma Smith's delightful and informative Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers
Lucasta Miller, Spectator Books of the Year
From bullet-stopping Bibles to tomes bound in human skin, Smith's history of books revels in their magic and malignity. It skewers our faith in the written word yet repays it handsomely
Telegraph