The making of books

Lucasta Miller reviews Emma Smith’s history of books, Portable Magic, in the latest issue of the Critic. Portable Magic, Miller writes, “is not a conventional history in the sense of a chronological narrative”:

Instead, it is a series of freewheeling essays, based on case studies, in which Smith explores what she calls “bookhood”: a concept that focuses on the material culture of the book, while revealing how inexorably it is tangled up with human desire, aspiration and power.

The range of reference is vast. One moment we are in Korea, where printed books with movable metal type long predated the Gutenberg Bible. The next we are in Islington public library, where volumes defaced with sub-Surrealistic add-ons by 1960s playwright Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell are now proudly displayed as art treasures — at the time, they were jailed for their efforts.

Miller notes Smith’s interest in the technology of the book. In an interview at the Guardian, Smith tells Alex Preston:

I think the technology of the book is probably its most important feature, because it establishes it as a kind of interface between us and the content. That interface has evolved, but it some ways it has remained remarkably constant. I quote Martial in the 1st century of the Christian era, saying how books were more convenient than scrolls because you could hold them with one hand. Now, if you gave Martial Portable Magic, he’d know exactly what that technology was and how to use it. The basic technology hasn’t changed in 2,000 years. There’s been a lot of discussion about ebooks and how they would either kill off the book or develop into fascinating multimedia objects, but actually neither of these things have happened. Kindles are very like books in format and size and in what they want to do. They haven’t revolutionised the interface. They want to be books.

I don’t know that I would say that the technology of a book is its most important feature, though it is important. It’s true that ebooks have not revolutionized reading, but we are still in the early stages of electronic texts, and I wonder what will happen after a few generations are raised reading things on phones and other screens rather than in physical books.

In other news

Sony refuses Chinese demand to delete Statue of Liberty from latest Spider-Man: “When Sony refused to delete the statue from the movie, Chinese authorities asked if the company could diminish the statue’s presence. Sony considered the request, the sources told Puck, but ultimately decided against editing the movie and did not release it in China. It’s unclear whether Chinese censors blocked the movie’s release or if Sony preemptively opted against releasing it.”

Marc M. Arkin reviews Brendan McConville’s The Brethren: A Story of Faith and Conspiracy in Revolutionary America:

Conspiracy theories run deep in American history. So it should come as no surprise that during the tumultuous period following the Declaration of Independence and the collapse of British institutions in the former American colonies, a group of yeomen and planters in the Albermarle region of North Carolina became suspicious of the intentions of local revolutionary authorities. The form that their suspicions took, however, might raise a modern eyebrow: they believed that the revolutionary leadership of North Carolina was involved in a Catholic-inspired plot to subvert the Protestant political culture that had previously guaranteed their rights as free Englishmen.

Aaron Weinacht reviews Eugene Vodolazkin’s newly translated novel Brisbane: “Gleb’s struggle with death is unexpectedly enlivened by his brief encounter and musical collaboration with Vera, a piano prodigy in dire need of a liver transplant. Together, they discover that though their time on earth will be short (and Vera dies during her transplant operation), they still have much that they can and should do together.”

Federer and death:

“Wait, Roger Federer’s not dead, is he?” a woman asked me at a coffee shop recently. I was reading Geoff Dyer’s new book, The Last Days of Roger Federer, and she had spotted the title. No, no, I said quickly. It’s a book about — but then I stopped. About what? “Things coming to an end, artists’ last works, time running out.” That is Dyer’s own brief accounting of his subjects; in other words, everything up to the edge of death, that sheer cliff toward which all of us are ambling. In fact, as is typical of Dyer, the book has little to do with Federer at all, alighting on him just a few times. Like nearly all of the author’s work, under whatever genre it may nominally arrive in our hands, it’s about him — a memoir in camouflage.

Building the first long-distance hiking trail in Kurdistan:

Mohammad is a founding partner in a project to build a 150-mile-long hiking trail through the autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq, or K.R.I., from the Nineveh Plains to the snow-covered mountains that border Iran. The route approaches zones recently liberated from ISIS and borderlands where Turkey is fighting an asymmetric war against guerrilla fighters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K. Despite these complications, if all goes well, the tentatively named Zagros Mountain Trail will stitch into a single two-week-long route fragments of walks following old canals and seasonal grazing paths, passing Byzantine temples and Jewish shrines, all while navigating around some seven million unexploded land mines from the Iran-Iraq and Persian Gulf wars.

Michel Houellebecq’s changing literary fortunes:

For many years, Michel Houellebecq was patronized by the French literary establishment as an upstart, what with his background in agronomy rather than literature, his miserable demeanor, his predilection for science fiction and his gift for unyieldingly saying the unsayable, especially about relations between the sexes. That’s all changed now. He won the Prix Goncourt in 2010 for The Map and the Territory and in 2019 was elevated to the Légion d’Honneur. The Nobel cannot be long delayed, the committee after all having honored the equally ornery V.S. Naipaul and J.M. Coetzee. Houellebecq’s new novel Anéantir, published in January in a luxury edition of 300,000 copies, was a quasi-official event in France, heralded by a reverential two-part interview in Le Monde in which he confided that he was a bit of an alcoholic and quite the tart, since he wrote not for money or applause but to be loved.