Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers

"The history of books has now become, quite rightly, an important subject in its own right. Given the remit of the Wolfson Prize, books about books feature prominently in the line-up. The year that I was in contention, Richard Ovenden’s excellent work about the history of book burning was on the shortlist. Emma Smith’s book brings a lot of pleasure. It’s very enjoyable. There are lots of juicy, tasty, and heart-warming anecdotes. We liked the way in which the stories are woven together. You’re moving around from the 12th century to the present. It’s not in a random way because there is an overall movement and sense of direction, and the sixteen chapters have particular themes to them. You get a sense of the power of books. There’s power in a positive sense, but the Stephen King quotation is also about the potential for books to be, as Emma Smith says, sickening, disturbing and enraging. Books have that negative capacity, too. One of the chapters is about Mein Kampf . That chapter is topical because it’s all about freedom of expression, which is an important issue for us all at the moment. This is a book that, in a very mild way, takes you to those big, important questions. I like the unassuming way in which she does that—not in a thumping-the-table, ‘this is what I think, therefore this is what we must all think’ way but opening issues up as questions to address. In fact, she doesn’t give answers. That’s what I like about her. She identifies the important things that we need to think about. The other thing I liked was the notion of the physicality of books—what she calls “bookhood”—and the relationship that you develop with them. As we are having this conversation on Zoom, I see books behind you, you see books behind me here. We’re surrounded by them. We do all kinds of things with them: they’re like props. We live in a small flat in north Oxford which is completely overflowing and we don’t know what to do with them. We despair. That whole relationship with books is something she talks about in a very intelligent, subtle, and often touching way. For all of those reasons, we thought this book should be on the shortlist."