The Magic of Books - Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan (1934–1996) was an American astronomer, astrobiologist, and award-winning science communicator best known for Cosmos, the landmark 1980 TV series and bestselling book.
He helped popularise planetary science, worked on NASA’s Mariner, Viking and Voyager missions, and co-founded The Planetary Society.
Sagan won the Pulitzer Prize for The Dragons of Eden (1977) and inspired generations with ideas like the “pale blue dot.” His clear, lyrical prose connected rigorous science with human wonder - exactly the spirit captured in his celebrated reflection on books as “proof that humans can work magic.”
“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called ‘leaves’) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles.
One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person – perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you.
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.”