bookshelf
What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Books break the shackles of time.
– Carl Sagan, Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)
