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The History of Literature
798 Emma Smith and Portable Magic - A History of Books and Their Readers (Revisited)
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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglomerate Network and LitHub Radio.
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Jack Wilson
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Emma Smith
Thank you so much for having me.
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Jack Wilson
So let's start with the title, which you draw from Stephen King. Like Me, you seem to be a fan of his book On Writing. I love that book. I've read it several times. And Portable Magic, you say, is a book about books rather than words. So what? Can you explain that a little bit for our listeners?
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Emma Smith
Yeah. So I think I absolutely love On Writing. Let's just have a sideways recommendation of that to anybody who is thinking about how they might improve their own writing or understand a bit about how other writers do it. Brilliant book. And Stephen King says books are a uniquely portable magic. And I was really entranced by that. But what I mean by saying my book is about books rather than words is that it's about the objects in which we encounter the stories and the characters and the themes and the ideas in books. It's not so much those stories, themes, and ideas themselves, although what I am interested in is how the physical form of books, the ways we encounter them with all our senses, actually do affect those other meanings.
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Jack Wilson
Yeah, right. I'll give you a concrete example that is 5 minutes old. Before we started our conversation, I decided that I really would like to receive a copy of this Is Shakespeare for Christmas. So I was putting it on my Amazon wish list for my family members to see and hopefully purchase for me. And I noticed that, at least at the moment, the hardcover is slightly cheaper than the paperback. And it really threw me for a loop because I really had to consider. You know, ordinarily the cost kind of drives my decision, but I really had to consider, do I want this in hardback or paper? I have to admit, I kind of like paperbacks better, but I know the hardcover is. It's more durable, but it really is. I mean, you could have told me, well, one has an appendix or one has an introduction by so and so. And that probably wouldn't have mattered as much to me as the feeling I get when I hold the book in my hand and open it up and engage with the words and the author and commune with that person across space and time. It matters to me how that book felt, feels in my hand.
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Emma Smith
I completely agree. That's such a good example. I think there is something different about a paperback. It's more approachable. It's more portable. It's more easy to, you know, operate with one hand or to be reading in, you know, in the bath or something like that. You don't feel it's quite so valuable an object. I find dust jackets on hardbacks a bit of a. Bit of a nuisance. They always get tatty. You don't want them to get tattied. You take them off, what's the point of having them?
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Jack Wilson
Right.
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Emma Smith
And yeah, and one of the things I loved finding out about importable magic was the development of the paperback, which is a really largely a post war American phenomenon. There's this extraordinary story that the American publishing world comes together as never before to supply free books to service personnel during the Second World War. And these books are uniquely soft backed. They're actually printed on the Reader's Digest print. So they're like little magazines and then cut in half. And that, that produces a new readership who are used to encountering their books with these relatively soft covers. Bit more sort of manageable, bit less. What would the word be? Bit less off putting, bit less austere, bit less formal.
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Jack Wilson
Yeah.
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Emma Smith
That market is the one that really has dominated ever since. One of the things I always think is there's a reason isn't that the Beatles never wrote a song called Hardback Writer. That's a completely different person, isn't it, from Paperback Writer.
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Jack Wilson
Yeah. And yet something does draw me to the hardcover because sometimes when I get a novel or something, or in your case, a book about Shakespeare, I'll sit up a little straighter in my chair, I'll give it a little more attention. I'll maybe make it more of an event to have a destination with the book. And I'll have a completely different experience than the one where I'm taking it with me on the train or having it on the bedside table. So it's a tough choice. Maybe I'll just ask for both.
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Emma Smith
Jack, let's exchange addresses. I would be honored to send you
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Jack Wilson
a copy of that book.
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Emma Smith
So take it off the list.
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Jack Wilson
Okay. So I think people are probably familiar with this. Everybody who's listening to this has had a book in their hand and they're aware of the size and the heft and the paper and the typeface and the COVID and even the smell and books as they age and so on. But I want to kind of make sure people understand that your book is about more than just what I just described. Might be something that you'd find an op ed piece in the Guardian or something where someone is talking about how great it is to see books. You really dig into the history and talk about negative examples. And maybe we should talk about that because that might get us away from the sort of idealization of books that sometimes conversations like this can have where we just talk about how wonderful it is to sit with a book and how we all love that experience.
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Emma Smith
Absolutely. And then we you know, we buy a candle, don't we, with the smell of books or something. It's all quite cozy and. But a little bit tweet. No, I agree. I mean, one of the things that really drew me to write this book was to understand why we are so weird about the book as an object. Why it's a different kind of object from similar, relatively cheap things that we have in and out of our lives. I was struck on Twitter. There was somebody who had cut in half a copy of David Foster Wallace's big novel Infinite Jest, in order to be able to carry it on a commute more easily. This is a very common book. It was a book that belonged to this person, but existed in thousands of other copies. But everybody I do know, Twitter is not. It's not the world. But everybody was outraged by this. As if damage or violence had been done to a person, to a feeling body. And I saw lots of examples of that. The ways that we treat books as if they are more than inanimate objects, we find it hard to give them away. We have a different attitude to a person who hoards more books. Many of us have more books than we could ever read actually in our remaining life. But that is the sign of an intellectual or a high minded person. Whereas a person who has more cars than they can ever drive or handbags than they can ever take out somewhere, those people are seen to have, you know, a problem or too much money or, you know, so we treat the book and ownership of the book in a different way. And I wanted to try and understand where that comes from. And for me, it partly comes from, I think, the fact that our first books were, were religious, but Bible and, you know, biblio, as in, you know, bibliography or bibliothech, they're the same word. And the, we can see the development of the book going sort of hand in hand with the development, but the extension, the evangelization of Christianity in the first centuries of the Christian era. And of course, books expand to include all kinds of information and content that's not religious. But I still think the book itself, the object, has retained some of that aura that makes it almost sacred in lots of places. We don't like to see books ripped up or thrown or treated in a, in a disrespectful way.
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Jack Wilson
Right.
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Emma Smith
And many cultures actually have a more formal version of that. You know, if you drop a book, when you pick it up, you kiss it or you apologize or, you know, you really do show reverence.
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Jack Wilson
Right.
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Emma Smith
Yeah.
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Jack Wilson
I have this Example from my personal life, when I was in college, I was just living in a dorm, and my roommate was six feet away on a bed, and neither of us had any nightstand or anything like that. There wasn't room for that kind of thing. And so I would just read my books and set them on the floor before I went to sleep. And as it happened, one of the books I had was the Bible, which I was reading for a class, I think, and my roommate, he just kind of shivered and he said, it's a good thing my father's not here. And I said, oh, why? And he said he would be beside himself that you have the Bible sitting on the floor.
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Emma Smith
Yeah, that's really fascinating, isn't it? And often it is explicitly religious books which carry the extreme violent provocation of burning, in particular, burning religious books. Yeah, it's still in religious books. We understand that the object of the book needs to be treated with the same reverence as its contents. And of course, you know, that means we have an idea what religious books should look like. I love. Did you remember the Jedi scriptures, which had been invented for the. For the end of the Star wars franchise? And we see Luke Skywalker, you know, on his. On his island, and he's there with the. The ancient library. And it's gold and silver, it's leather binding. It's the sort of blue of lapis lazuli. This is the kind of early medieval world of religious books, both Islamic and Judeo Christian, which is still what we imagine even a recently invented religion would need to have.
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Jack Wilson
Yeah, it's kind of that same dilemma, I guess, is not quite the right word, but it's. There's two approaches to religion, and one is to say the people who walk into this mighty Cathedral or St. Peter's or something like that, they'll be overwhelmed by the dazzling power of this religion that was able to support such an edifice. And then the other would say no. To really impress people, you should have a plain, unadorned structure where you're just going in and focusing on the religion. And the famous example of. In Indiana Jones, where he's choosing, well, what is the Holy Grail going to look like? It's a carpenter's son who's. It's just going to be plain wood. It's not going to be one of these elaborate bejeweled containers. And it's kind of like that with books. You see the medieval manuscripts and they look like. I don't know, they're almost as elaborate as birthday cakes or something. With the intricate designs and the magisterial, impressive forms. But I guess you probably also found some religious texts that were trying to come in a plain and humble way as well.
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Emma Smith
It's such a good example of how the different formats show that the same content is going to be used and experienced in quite different ways. So you're quite right that those sort of display copies are all about the power of the religion. And in fact, that's what Gutenberg was doing when he prints the first printed Bibles in the middle of the 15th century. I think he's partly doing that at a point where when Christendom, that the rule of Christianity in Europe has had this enormous shock. Constantinople has fallen to the Ottoman Empire. And there's a real sort of reverberation, you know, is the writing on the wall for Christianity. And what Gutenberg does is to publish this big format made to last kind of object that's making lots of different statements at the same time. But right around the same period, we have very small portable Bibles for friars and other evangelizing groups to carry around with them. And we can see at other points the way that cheap Bibles. Right now you can see cheap Bible formats. The Gideon Bible Society is a really interesting book producer, how those books have spread. The kinds of Bibles that are being taken into China or into other. Other places right now, these are sort of in those contexts, dissident books or hidden books. And they often have the form of that. That's something more covert. So sometimes you're making a big statement about what's in your book, and sometimes you're trying to slip it through unnoticed.
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Jack Wilson
Yeah, we have that in the States with the Constitution, where on the one hand, you know, you often see it portrayed as this. Almost like a scroll on yellow parchment. And it's this giant document, the kind of thing that you would see under GL a museum or here in the National Archives in D.C. or you can also get basically a free copy of it as a sort of pamphlet that bookstores and publishers and things will just give away to law school students or to high school students who are studying the Constitution as something you could just keep in a jacket pocket or carry around with you as not having that kind of talismanic power, but a sort of. Well, these are words that belong to all of us and govern all of us. And it's good to have these close to us so we can consult it and remember that this is the source of our laws and so on.
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Emma Smith
Yeah, the sort of citizen version and the yeah, the kind of, as you say, talismanic version. I was really interested in books that have that talismanic feature. You know that swearing on books is very interesting phenomenon. You know, that you would take an oath on a book. Here in the UK we still have that. There was a survey about whether it should continue, given that a majority of people don't subscribe to one of these religions of the book. But nevertheless, we kept it as the way to secure testimony or other kind of legal statements. And there. That's exactly on the book as an object. It's not on the book. It's not reading from the book. It's not even opening the pages. It's putting your hand on the closed volume. And if you look at, for example, the books that American presidents have sworn their oaths on, those are books with really important provenance. Do you use the same Bible that Lincoln chose? There's a great story about how Lincoln's books were in transit at his inauguration. So a clerk ran out and bought completely standard copy from a bookstore. But that has become a really iconic political document. Do you swear on that? Do you swear on the missile that was used after JFK's assassination on a Force One? You know, there are all kinds of ways in which these books have meanings which are not. Which are to do with who's owned them and where they've come from and what their own life stories are rather than the contents within them.
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Jack Wilson
Yeah. Now, another way of looking at the power of books is to look at the negative experiences. You say books are wonderful, challenging, transporting, dash. But sometimes also sickening, disturbing, enraging. So what are some examples you found of the latter?
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Emma Smith
Do you know, the example, Jack, that I really tried to tussle with because it's so difficult for us, was Hitler's book, Mein Kampf. And I thought about that because it's funny that you mentioned Indiana Jones. Do you remember when he's at the book burnings in Berlin and he ends up actually getting something signed by Hitler. So because Nazism, Nazi Germany was so associated, particularly in the American mind, with book burning, with restrictions that became, I suppose, in advance of the understanding of the true horror of the genocide of the Holocaust, this was what was associated with fascism, these restrictions on human liberty. And so the Americans, what they were fighting for was a kind of freedom to publish. And those paperbacks that I was talking about that go out to American service personnel, they're very, very diverse. They include a book like Strange Fruit, which was about an interracial romance, which was actually Very controversial at the time. So they're not a bland assessment. So they were living that injunction to publish freely. But they had a terrible problem, as we have continued to, with what to do in that context with Mein Kampf. Should that circulate freely? Who should profit from it? What should be done with the profits? What were the obligations of the press to this poisonous material? And given that Nazi Germany was itself really a cult of the book, there were millions and millions of copies of Mein Kampf in pretty much every household, every soldier. There were loads and loads of military copies that you carried around with you as a soldier. There were copies that couples got as wedding gifts given to them by the state. So this was the real symbol of the ideology of Nazi Germany. So it's all invested in that book. And what we don't get in Germany is the sort of a reduced or an abbreviated version or famous quotations from Mein Kampf. It's somehow not really even about the content. It's about this great big book. So it's been a huge problem ever since. Amazon has had difficulties sometimes thinking it will ban sales of it. The banning of it always produces a huge interest in the book. What we know elsewhere is the Barbra Streisand effect. You know, Barbra Streisand wanted to stop the pictures of her beachside house being circulated. And of course, in doing that, made everybody interested in the.
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Jack Wilson
What do they look like?
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Emma Smith
Yeah. And, you know, censorship, book censorship very much has that counter effect. In some ways, the best thing that could happen to my book, Portable Magic, is that it should be banned.
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Jack Wilson
Banned, right.
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Emma Smith
What to do with that, you know, how to do? And Mein Kampf has just come out of copyright. And the Germans have had a really interesting sort of public discussion about what to do. And they've produced this highly scholarly big two volume critical edition, which has every quotation sort of scrutinised and every page annotated, so you can't read it without it being framed by all this commentary. But for some people, that's given it too much seriousness, really, you know, turned it into a book like Aristotle or something when it shouldn't be. So it's really difficult to know what to do with these problem texts. And I think that's a problem that's as old as books themselves.
- [21:38]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, right. Because we might object to the contents and say, well, this is propaganda, or this is full of hate speech, or this teaches people how to build a nuclear bomb or whatever it is. And to say we can't have, even though we believe in free speech. And we believe in books and we are against censorship and all of that. We also can see where books can be very harmful. And what your book raised for me was it's not just sort of a question of should this knowledge be available for people to get, but all of the subsidiary questions like who should profit from it and who should be in charge of deciding what happens with this book. Should it be the government, should it be companies that are acting according to their conscience, should it be individual readers who are voting with their pocketbooks and so on? And it, it's very difficult when a book like that kind of exposes the underside of our ideals.
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Emma Smith
I think that's absolutely true. I mean, I talked about the attempts of the Catholic Church over many centuries to maintain an up to date list of prohibited books and they finally give up in the 1960s and just think, oh, the tide is, you know, the tide is against us thinking, you know, what books get onto their air. But also the fact that, you know, there's plenty of evidence that this catalogue of forbidden books became for some people the must have books. You know, the very fact that they had been banned again drew attention to them. I think that those attempts to, institutional attempts to censor have pretty much failed in the West. So we have a pretty uncensored public sphere largely because of the availability of online material. But book censorship is still alive and well, isn't it? And as you say, it's really at the level of consumers, parents particularly that very, very active local groups putting pressure on school districts, libraries, bookstores, and operating very effectively at a small scale where it's actually easier just to say, okay, we withdraw that or we won't sell that. We won't let young people read that. So book censorship at the level of the state here in the west, it's pretty much gone. But at the level of individual communities is very, very alive.
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Jack Wilson
Yeah, right. Okay, let's take a quick break and then come back. And I want to ask you about the elephant in the room here, which I think is the Internet foreign. Hey folks, launching a business is fun, but there's so much to do and so much risk. What if I put out a podcast and nobody listens? What if nobody buys my products? That's why it's great to have one. Go to partner on your side. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. From household names like Heinz and Mattel to brands just getting started like Gymshark and Death Wish Coffee. Choose one of Shopify's hundreds of ready to use templates to build a beautiful store that matches your brand and benefit from all of Shopify's behind the scenes tools like campaigns, inventory, shipping, payments, analytics and more. If you get stuck, Shopify is there to help with their award winning 24. 7 customer support. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com literature go to shopify.com literature that's shopify.com literature ready to soundtrack your summer with Red Bull Summer All Day Play. You choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep end dj, a road dog, or a trail mixer? Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play Red Bull gives you wings. Visit red bull.com brightsummerahead to learn more. See you this summer. This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home with agents who close twice as many deals. When you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started@redfin.com own the dream. You tell yourself no one wants your college era band tees, but on Depop, people are searching for exactly what you've got. You once paid a small fortune for them at merch stands. Now a teenager who calls them vintage will offer that same small fortune back. Sell them easily on Depop. Just snap a few photos and we'll take care of the rest. Who knew your questionable music taste would be a money making machine? Your style can make you cash Start selling on Depop, where taste recognizes taste.
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Jack Wilson
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Jack Wilson
Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher for delivery. Okay, we're back with Emma Smith. So the Internet. Maybe the first thing I noticed was how it changed bookstores. It used to be every time I would go to a new country or certainly even a new city, I would head to the bookstores. Go to the used bookstores. I'd find books there that were out of print and unavailable and it would be kind of this moment of oh, wow, look at this. I can discover this book. And then all of a sudden every book was available to me at all times and I no longer had this relationship with bookstores. It didn't become a. A must do necessarily, because even though the experience of going in there was still enjoyable and I still could have that feeling of discovery, it just kind of took away the necessity of it. And so it has kind of made me think, as I've been thinking about your book and that books being objects as well as just words, kind of that distinction and an e reader or PDFs available online and so on. We can get these, the text in different places. But where are we headed in terms of that relationship we have with books as objects?
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Emma Smith
It's such a great question because you're absolutely right that the serendipity of the books that you might find particularly secondhand, you didn't know whether you were going to be able to find something that you knew you wanted or something that you didn't even know you wanted. I guess the second of those we still get, you know, browsing physical books in a bookstore is a different experience from browsing in any form. Online, I think is often less satisfying. If you know what you want, the Internet will find it. If you don't know what you want, it may not help you discover it. Perhaps. Although, I must say, although I try and support local bookshops, as many of us do, I do find Amazon's recommendations very, very accurate and often draw my attention to things I don't know. I want, you know.
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Jack Wilson
Right. Having the customer reviews right there. And like, there are some very good things about the book buying experience. But we do miss that. It's almost like speed dating with the books when you can look at the spines on the shelf and you just know from the size and the thickness and maybe holding it in your hand and opening it up, you know what kind of book you're getting in a way that. I don't know. A lot of people are probably like me, where they've been disappointed. They buy a book online, they get it and they think, oh, I didn't realize the print was going to be so tiny. This isn't going to be the experience. Yeah. Or this book. Oh, I didn't realize it was 900 pages. I was looking for a biography that was more like 200 pages. And all of those things. You can't replicate the physical bookstore. But on the other hand, a bookstore can't replicate having 10 million titles available either.
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Emma Smith
I think there are lots of Aspects to this. I sometimes buy print on demand books, which is another thing that's now possible, which wasn't before. And whenever I do I, when I open them I realize they have a strange smell. They have a very highly chemical smell which must be to do with the printing process. And they are not very often, they're not very pleasurable books to operate. Yeah, it's not a nice experience. So it's, it's, you know, it's usually useful content but it's not a nice experience. One consequence of the availability of online or electronic books has actually been much more care and attention given by mainstream publishers to new modern books and their format. So they're tending to be better produced more artistically interesting, better stitching. There's a novel by a British novelist called Charlotte Mendelssohn which I've been enjoying this year, which has fore edge painting, you know, a kind of decoration which you can see on the outer pages when they're all closed together in the book. There's a sort of decoration there. Now that was an 18th century hand done thing that people did to pimp up their books which we haven't seen really for centuries. And it's interesting to see that kind of thing back in the day. And I think that must be a response to the ebook experience. Thinking if you are going to opt for a physical book book, let's really go for it. Let's emphasize the pleasures of that. The weight of the paper, maybe a little ribbon, marker, a nice cover or something. Maybe people are more interested in carefully produced physical books because they know they can get the content elsewhere. Yeah, maybe cheap books, really cheap books have had their day because the really cheapest way to access the content of books is online. And perhaps the physical books that will remain are sort of higher quality. I worry slightly that I don't want books to become the vinyl of the2030s. That's to say something that is highly desired by a very small and enthusiastic niche of people. And everybody else accesses that material in other ways. And the music industry is I think, a really interesting way. That's obviously ahead of the book industry in all kinds of ways. But a really interesting way to think, you know, is that the way that we're headed?
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Jack Wilson
Right. We've mostly given up album cover art except as you say, for a really niche audience who sort of says no, no, I want the experience just like I used to have or my father or maybe my grandfather used to have, depending how young they are. You know, 1975, you'd get the album, you'd look at the COVID you'd maybe read the lyrics, you'd see who the musicians were, and you'd sit with the album while you were listening to it. We've kind of given all that up in favor of streaming, but we've kind of lost something as well.
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Emma Smith
Well, it's a completely differently curated way to encounter music, isn't it? In lots of ways, we've. In many ways, we've lost the album as well, or the album is no longer the unit of musical delivery, just as in some ways, the poetry collection might be an equivalent. Would we get individual poems as the unit of what we want to buy? I was really interested that Amazon have been trialing a Kindle subscription where you pay according to how many pages you read, rather than you pay per book or per download. I know it would be terrifying if you're a writer, to know, yeah, you only got three cents from this because nobody got page two. But it's an interesting idea that you pay to consume rather than you pay for the object. That felt to me quite a challenge for what a book is, because what has been the same hitherto is that the content of the book is the same whether you get it for an ebook reader or whether you get it as a physical book. The idea of the book, the idea of the book contents is the same. That hasn't really been challenged, but this readership model did seem to me to challenge that in certain ways.
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Jack Wilson
Yeah, it's almost like another example I was thinking of is film, where it seems like they were faced with a similar dilemma once DVD sales dropped off and they were dealing with streaming and so on and people at home having larger and larger television sets. And so their experience was kind of starting to rival what people would get from going to the movies. And they kind of responded by saying, okay, we get that you're gonna be watching a lot of these at home, but if you come to the theater, we'll give you a lot of special effects and you'll have action sequences with the sound and the size of the screen and everything that you just won't be able to replicate. Like, this is a movie you want to see in the theater. And we ended up kind of. I don't know if we lost costume dramas and, you know, regular dramas of just people without superhero costumes and so on. I don't know if we lost it or if it just shifted over to the streamers and the television stations and so on, but we kind of lost what we had in the 80s and 90s of movies that you would go to that didn't have a lot of action sequences and so on. And so it seems like it kind of forced the changes in content. And when you're describing people reading by page, I could see where authors would start writing a lot of cliffhangers into even books that maybe wouldn't necessarily have cliffhangers, and something that could keep you turning the pages and previewing what's to come, and all of these different ways they could build in. Well, how do I keep people going from page to page to page?
- [36:21]
Emma Smith
And that would be back, wouldn't it, to the serial stories of the 19th century? Dickens wrote all his novels in serial form. You had to make each one something that people wanted to buy the next one. You partly segmented them to make them cheaper, to make them available to a wider audience. But you also, you know, needed to keep your readers. And you can see how those stories are structured around that form. So it's a really great example of how form and content, you know, publishing form or the form of the media more generally, as you said about film, really does change what we encounter in it and what meanings we give it. And one of the things that was so interesting to me thinking about a long history of books, so I don't start at the beginning and come to now, but what I do see is lots of sort of parallel or echoes across this long history and the question of keeping audiences interested. And the commercial aspect of books has been obviously ongoing. Books only get produced because there is a market for them. Printing only came to Europe because there was a market for its products. And so the market, the economic factors, the commercial factors are, and the way they've changed and been interwoven with what we get to read are really fascinating.
- [37:45]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. One thing that comes to mind as we look to the future and have this idea that maybe the movement that will be made in response to the latest technological change. I'm sure technological change has been one of the recurring themes that you've seen as things have changed in the way people are able to produce books. It's probably changed what authors do and what readers expect and so on. But it seems like if where we're headed is these books as these beautiful objects and books as something a little bit special and something that can justify the $20 price tag and so on, is that it will raise awareness perhaps of the people who work on books who aren't just the author and they're kind of the unsung heroes of books. These cover Designers and the people who do the typesetting and the brands of books that are put out. Penguin, for example, is one everyone is familiar with. There's something special about getting a book, you know, is a Penguin and fits into the whole Penguin ethos, and people find that special. Maybe we'll see that more and more with a kind of. It would be kind of nice if the covers and so on. If some of the people who make books as. And the reading experience as great as it is, who get a little more credit for being part of that process,
- [39:09]
Emma Smith
I would love that. And there's one publisher, and I just can't remember who it is, but I've noticed that they have started to give a list in the book of everybody who worked on it and really began to acknowledge the enormous act of teamwork that goes into the physical production of books, the marketing, the design, all of those elements that, as you say, is often hidden. I mean, whatever writers do, they don't write books. You know, books are made by a whole lot of people, not usually writers. So it is absolutely important to bring that to the fore and to make us more conscious, perhaps, as we're becoming a bit more conscious generally of where do the commodities we enjoy come from and what has gone into their making, and are we okay with that? Is it ethically or, you know, environmentally or whatever? Is that a good supply line? And one of the things, for example, that I think we're thinking a lot more about is books and book waste. The book modern publishing industry has a lot of waste built into it.
- [40:11]
Jack Wilson
Right, Right.
- [40:12]
Emma Smith
An awful lot of books are withdrawn and pulped.
- [40:16]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [40:18]
Emma Smith
Some of them are recycled into other books, but, you know, that paper pulp is used for other things. Whether this is an industry which is a bit casual about that level of waste, I think is an important question right now.
- [40:31]
Jack Wilson
Okay, so last question. What is your hope for your book? What do you hope readers will take away from their experience that they have when they hold your book in their hand?
- [40:43]
Emma Smith
I really hope, and I love hearing when this happens. I really hope that readers will read my book and. And it will make them think about the books in their own life, the books from their past, from their childhood, perhaps books that were important to them or books that they read with grandparents or, you know, times that are lost. And to think about the emotional weight that those books carry in their lives. That's what I really hope.
- [41:08]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. And not just what we often say of, well, books can take you places you've never been and they can send you into the past and so on, which could apply to the words, too, but the actual relationship and the importance of the physical book that you had in your life for that period of time. Yeah. Okay. That's beautiful. Emma Smith, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [41:34]
Emma Smith
Thank you.
- [41:41]
Jack Wilson
Oh, okay. That was emma Smith in January 2023 talking about portable magic, the history of books and their readers. My thanks to Emma Smith for joining me and of course, to you, the listeners. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time. Foreign. It's Mushrooms with me, Matty Matheson. You know what's better than thinking about dinner? Too hard not stop that and just choose mushrooms. Five minutes. Done. Dinner's that easy and you feel like a genius. It's not magic, it's mushrooms. Stop stressing.
- [43:24]
Emma Smith
At Mushroomcouncil.com looking to strengthen your health and well being? Tune in to the Doctor show, one of Apple podcasts top alternative health shows. I'm Dr. Tina Moore, naturopathic physician and chiropractor and I cover topics like metabolic health, chronic diseases, pain management and more. With expert interviews and solo episodes. I keep it no nonsense with a science backed approach to empower you to improve your health and resilience. New episodes every Thursday produced by Drake Peterson and Wellness Loud.