Emma Smith and Mark Hodkinson For the Love of Books

What is it about books that drives such passion in us? The journalist and now author of No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy: Memoirs of a Working-Class Reader, Mark Hodkinson charts his path from a childhood with one book kept on top of the wardrobe to a love affair with books that has shaped his life. Whilst the writer and Shakespeare professor, Emma Smith, unfurls the exciting and iconoclastic story of the book in human hands, exploring when, why and how it acquired its particular hold over us. Titled Portable Magic, it hails the rise of the mass-market paperback, dismantles some myths, reveals strange ways our reading habits have developed and proposes new definitions of a 'classic'. A must event for anyone who ever loved a book.