66 | SATURDAY | 30.04.22 | The Guardian
CULTURE BOOKS
A love letter
to reading
From ancient
China to shelfi es –
the joy of ‘bookhood’
Kathryn Hughes
O
NE OF THE MOST familiar visual
tropes to emerge from the pandemic
has been that of Serious People seated
in front of their bookshelves. Whether
it’s a cabinet minister on television
or an accountant working from home,
the poetics of Zoom insist on a backdrop of titles
composed of equal parts stuff y professional manual,
well-thumbed Penguin Classic and, for those who like
to raise the stakes, last year’s International Booker
prize shortlist. Books don’t just furnish a room, they
semaphore to the world exactly how you yourself
wou ld l i ke to be read.
In this brilliantly written account of the book-as-
material-object, Emma Smith explains that people
have been posing in front of their libraries ever since
Gut enberg started cranking up the printing press.
Before, in fact: one of her earliest revelations is that
p e o p l e i n C h i n a a n d K o r e a w e r e p r i n t i n g b o o k s s e v e r a l
centuries before sluggish northern Europe got round
to it. Still, one of the most deft proponents of the early
“shelfi e” was Jeanne Antoinette Poisson , also known
a s M ad a me de P o mp ado u r, c o mp a n io n o f L o u i s X V. I n
the 1750s, when Jeanne was making the tricky move
from maîtresse-en-titre to femme savante, she enrolled
her favourite painter, François Boucher , to manage the
transformation. From now on he was to paint her either
against a backdrop of crammed bookshelves or, betterstill, actually reading a book and looking thoughtful
about it.
Boucher was careful to give bookish Jeanne the
same creamy décolletage and luscious sweep of a silk
gown that featured in her early publicity portraits, on
the grounds that there was no reason why a woman
couldn’t be clever and sexy too. It was a message that
Marilyn Monroe took to heart when in 1955 she posed
for the famous photograph taken by Eve Arnold , in
which she wears a swimsuit while absorbed in
Ulysses, a novel often described as unreadable. The
following year Monroe would marry playwright
Arthur Miller, prompting Variety’s famous headline:
“Egghead Weds Hourglass”. Monroe’s “shelfi e”, then,
functions along similar lines to Madame de
Pompadour’s careful self-staging as she transitions
from pin-up to public intellectual.
In Portable Magic – the phrase is borrowed from
Stephen King – Smith’s subject is the mater iality of
reading, or what she calls “bookhood”. Books in their
physical form turn out to be endlessly adaptable,
not just in the domestic space as doorstop s, yoga
blocks, and occasional kindling when times are
tough, but out in the world too. In the fi rst world war,
pocket-sized Bibles were clad in full metal jackets in
the hope that, carried close to the heart, they might
save a soldier from enemy fi re while also saving his
soul. More mundane is the revelation that, at the
beginning of this century, fragments of some 2.5 m
copies of Mills & Boon novels were used to create an
absorbent, noise-reducing layer for surfacing the M6
toll motorway in the Midlands. This, though, should
not be taken as a comment on commercial romantic
fi ction: Smith reminds us that being turned into
substratum, or something like it, is the fate of most
books, high or low. Her own publisher , the esteemed
Penguin Random House, runs a large “centralised
returns processing site” in Essex which shreds, crushes
and bales around 25,000 of its own books every
single day.
More joyous altogether is Smith’s retelling of the
creative intervention perpetrated by Joe Orton and his
lover Kenneth Halliwell on their library books in the
late 1950s and early 60s. Each week the men would take
out the lustreless novels available from their local
Islington branch and spend the intervening weeks
snipping out the cover images and patching them up
with something surreal before returning the books for
c i r c u l a t i o n. P h y l l i s H a m b l e d o n ’ s 1 9 6 0 b o d i c e r i p p e r ,
Queen’s Favourite, had its cover re purposed so that,
instead of a young wasp-waisted woman in a ruff , the
main fi gures were now two bare-chested male wrestlers.
In a study of John Betjeman the photograph of the straw-
hatted poet was replaced with one of a pot-bellied and
heavily tattooed man in his underpants. Orton and
Halliwell also had their way with blurbs, so that the
inside fl ap for Gaudy Nights hailed Dorothy L Sayers
“at her most queer, and needless to say, at her
most crude!”Space to think
in Stuttgart
public libraryHISTORY
Portable Magic
A History of Books
and Their Readers
Emma Smith
ALLEN LANE, £20
NONFICTION