Emma Smith’s enchanting book about books borrows its title from Stephen King, who describes them as “uniquely portable magic”.

Smith is a professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford, a bookish environment if ever there was one, and in Portable Magic she celebrates not only the history and evolution of books, but their function and totemic status as the manifestation of ideas in a physical form – their very “bookhood”.

The usual suspects are all here – the Chinese printers of the 7th-century BC, Gutenberg and his Bibles, the publishing tycoons, and the authors of everything from the scrolls of Alexandria to paperback smut. But front and centre is the book itself, and Smith’s contagious fascination with the material, decorative and talismanic aspects of the packaging and dissemination of the printed word. We learn that not only did Gutenberg’s 1455 edition of the Bible run to a remarkable 1282 pages, but that it took six pressmen two years work to produce around 170 copies in total. Hardly a bestseller, despite its epochal place in publishing history, and it’s hardly surprising that Gutenberg fell foul of his creditors and was bankrupt 10 years later.

F. Scott Fitzgerald went to his grave believing The Great Gatsby to be a failure.Credit:Getty Images

Portable Magic sparkles with gems of trivia that often conceal deeper truths about the evolution of reading and publishing. For instance, in 1940, the year of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s death, his royalty cheque for The Great Gatsby amounted to an underwhelming $13. It was its inclusion in the works selected by the Council for Books in Wartime, a committee of publishers, librarians and literary luminaries, for distribution to all American servicemen during World War II, that immortalised Fitzgerald’s work with an initial print run six times his publisher Scribner’s output in the years since its 1925 debut. Fitzgerald went to his grave believing his masterwork to be a failure, a failure that has sold in the millions since the war, but Smith’s exploration ranges far beyond the quirks of fate that make or break the reputations of writers and publishers.