getting new and used books of all kinds for my birthday and christmas gifts in the last couple of months has added to my stacks, and i couldn’t be happier about seeing them grow. these thoughtful gift givers know me so well. 

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‘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. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

– Carl Sagan – Cosmos, Part II: The Persistence of Memory, 1980

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image credit: book riot