Paul A. Samuelson’s legendary textbook, straightforwardly titled Economics, most famously exemplifies Samuelson the writer. To mark the release of the eighteenth edition of the textbook in July 2004, this paper briefly considers the textbook, and the celebrity (and criticism) it attracted. Economists and academics in general don’t have much difficultly appreciating Samuelson’s extraordinary contribution. Simply reading Samuelson’s text Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) or browsing through the plethora of intellectual jewels displayed in the many volumes of The Collected Scientific Papers of Paul A. Samuelson (1966–86) makes these contributions selfexplanatory. But one of the most compelling characteristics of Paul Samuelson is his ability to communicate equally well to all audiences, whether academics, students forced to take an economics class for the first time, or the average individual. If you limited your reading to Samuelson’s academic writings, which are characterized by an unyielding surge of theoretical rigor, one might get the impression that one was dealing with an alien of sorts; a creature simply too brilliant to communicate with the average human, and whose ideas could only be understood by a select few academics. Yet Samuelson’s true brilliance is his ability to flawlessly tune his writing to any audience, whether mathematically inclined economists and graduate students,