This Week's non-related reading: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Clay Jannon is at a bit of a loss. His last job, web deign at NewBagel went the way of the cronut during the recession, leaving Clay with no job, an art-school thesis on Swiss typography, and an old company-issued MacBook. So when he walks by a help wanted sign and the shadowy proprietor of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore asks him what he is seeking in his shelves, he can only answer with the truth: a job. And as a clerk there, his life just gets stranger and stranger. First, he works the graveyard shift in a bookstore, but it gets weirder than that. He learns that while there are customers who will wander in with the hopes of buying a book—but there are no teenage wizards, vampire police, or biographies of Albert Einstein here—there is also a strange group of men and women who come in to borrow one of the books in the back—books written in some sort of esoteric code. And Clay must keep a meticulous of what they borrow—not just titles, but appearance, state of mind, and what the buttons on their clothes are made of. 

Things really take a turn for the weird, though, when a hyper targeted Google Ad search (“likes books, night owl, carries cash, not allergic to dust, enjoys Wes Anderson movies, recent GPS ping within 5 blocks”) brings in Kat Potente, a lover of codes with the power to harness Google’s tech to figure out just what on earth is going on in the back stacks of Mr. Penumbra’s bookstore. Unraveling that brings in a odd cast of characters participating in a modern day quest, with modern day heroes and villains (the Big Bad Wolf of the story, for example, collects the IP addresses of people who download pirated books and turns them over to be sued, and charges exorbitant licensing fees). Our narrator and his friends want to use the powers of the new to unlock the secrets of the old, and pit the mass resources of Google to solve the problem that black robed scholars have been trying to figure out with pencil and paper for 500 years. And the result is… not what anyone expected. 

There has been a lot of ink (virtual and otherwise) spilled over the fate of the book in our technological world, and I think one of the things I appreciated most about this book is the approach this book takes about the relation between books and technology. The love and admiration for both is palpable. The members of the Unbroken Spine, after all, revere and spend their lives trying to decode the Codex vitae of Aldus Manutius. If anyone wanted to make a then current technology obsolete, it was this dude. He dusted off countless manuscripts of the likes of Aristotle and Pliny, set the type, and churned out an mind-blowingly large number of copies (for the time). Who needs manuscripts? Buy my books! And even though knowledge was no longer carefully maintained in the minds of those scribes who meticulously copied it, it did not mean the end of the written word, just the beginning of the printed word. And now we have the digital word, coexisting more or less peacefully (depending on the latest polemic) with the printed one, just like shelves in Manutius’ day were stuffed with both printed texts and manuscripts. And even the ancient Mr. Penumbra has a Kindle. And a Nook. And a Kobo. And he managed to get his hands on a cool Google prototype e-reader. 

The epilogue was a bit of a letdown though, and it is an encapsulation of the one great problem I had with the novel. Everything works out, and it works out too easily. Need to make an exact facsimile of an old ledger? Well it is a good thing you happen to have a friend who can do that for you.  Scan and OCR that (hand-written) sucker?  Google an a couple of nameless and faceless people (mostly Estonians) to the rescue.  Need to clandestinely scan an old book in a library? A portable scanner will appear to you in a pizza box in DUMBO. And so on. But, that really does not detract (for me, at least) from the charm of the story, and if it can be at times hokey, well, sometimes it is nice to imagine a world where everything works out. And if the big conclusion that the main characters come to is a mushy mess that gives you the feel-good-fuzzies… well, who doesn’t like feel-good-fuzzies from time to time? 

But, it’s great. It has everything a book could need, and them some: shadowy 24 hour bookstores next to seedy 24 hour strip clubs. Lunches at Google HQ, and a midnight quest into the dragon’s lair. Museums of knitting that accept yarn donations in lieu of admissions fees, and a company that made millions by rendering breasts for computer games. Dodgy internet message boards, and dodgier libraries with books chained to the tables. So go, read it. But read it now. I can only imagine that a few years down the road, we’ll look back at how obsolete the technology described is. Oh, back in 2012, you had to carry a laptop across the room if you wanted to video chat into a party? How quaint. 

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Best line out of context line(s): 

“I did not know people your age still read books,” Penumbra says. He raises an eyebrow. “I was under the impression that they read everything on their mobile phones.”

“Not everyone. There are plenty of people who, you know—people who still like the smell of books.”

“The smell!” Penumbra repeats. “You know you are finished when people start talking about the smell.”

“Anyway, he swiped some silver forks and spoons … and the Gerritzoon punches, Some say it was revenge, but I think it was desperation. Latin fluency doesn’t get you very far in New York City.” 

You know, I’m really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.

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This has been, so far, my favorite book of 2014.