Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
A love letter to books and their power to enthrall
Where does a text exist? A book seems like the obvious answer, but texts can be orally transmitted, etched onto banana leaves, or downloaded from cyberspace and read on a screen. Whereas a text is metaphysical, books are decidedly physical (leaving aside, for now, e-books and audiobooks) and Oxford professor Emma Smith explores books as material objects in “Portable Magic,” a book for people who love books.
Lifting her title from Stephen King, who in “On Writing” wrote that books are “a uniquely portable magic,” Smith accordingly begins her delightful introduction with the fable of the Sorcerer and the Apprentice, retold many times but most indelibly in Disney’s “Fantasia.” Books, the fable tells us, contain power. If not handled by a properly trained scholar, they can unleash not only danger but evil — think “Mein Kampf,” to which Smith devotes a chapter. Yet she’s most interested in the form of books, not their content.
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Books are symbols, that is, and Smith initially stumbles with her chapter on Gutenberg’s Bible, debunking the “Western myth” of it symbolizing innovation in printing, as the process previously existed in China and elsewhere. But no one seriously thinks “print is a European invention,” as she claims, just that books are. Smith’s weakest passages are such rote, post-colonial critiques, which she delivers perfunctorily, as if obliged.
Before Gutenberg, of course, there were scrolls, which is how the books of the Bible were originally kept. The first codex, Smith tells us, was able to collect these scrolls of the Bible into one book, allowing the reader to flip pages, easily compare earlier or later parts of a text, keep our place with a mark, and do other activities we now take for granted. In other words, as Smith clarifies, books “are vital exemplars of a resilient technology that has barely changed over more than a millennium but that has changed us, our habits, and our culture.”
Chapter by chapter, Smith offers case studies to promote theories about how books as objects convey meaning. For instance, a book’s presentation determines how it’s read. Large and heavy leather-bound books with elaborate designs and an iron latch are treated as sacred objects, even guarded behind lock and key, whereas mass-market paperbacks are flippantly left in little free libraries for the next reader.
Revealingly, books are burned not to eradicate their content but as symbolic gestures of political theater. It’s not the destruction itself that bothers us, but the reasons behind it; no one complains when publishers pulp remaindered books by the thousands, but the Nazi book burnings of 1933 epitomize anti-intellectual barbarism.
Ultimately, Smith argues convincingly, a book is never just a book. And perhaps that’s why despite a decade of premature obituaries, books are alive as ever.