Portable Magic Quotes

“Bibliomania’ was typically characterized by an immoderate, even ruinous attachment to books acquired through purchase or theft, with a strong suggestion that these books were to serve an inert and possessive collection, rather than for reading or other direct use.”
― Emma Smith, Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers

“It’s funny how having lots of books—more than you could read in the rest of your life—makes a person seem like an intellectual, whereas having more shoes than you can wear or cars than you can drive makes you seem needy or overcompensating.”
― Emma Smith, Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers

“As this book has explored, we have always had different, complex motives for our relationships with our books. Jorge Luis Borges described a book as ‘a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships’: Portable Magic has argued for two particular kinds of relationship in our long love affair with books. One is the interconnectedness of book form and book content. And the other is the reciprocity and proximity of books and their readers, in relationships that leave both parties changed. This copy of Portable Magic now carries traces of your DNA in its gutter, your fingerprints on its cover. If you own it, you can bend its page corners or write your name in it or make satirical comments in the margin. You can lend it, or return it to the library, or give it away, or send it to the charity shop, but it will always be somehow yours.”
― Emma Smith, Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers

“This is a relationship in which each partner has the capacity to abuse the other: books can crack our spines, loosen our leaves, mark us with their dirty fingers and write in our margins just as much as we can theirs.”
― Emma Smith, Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers