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Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012

Clay Jannon is an out of work web designer, an art-school graduate with a curious mind, bibliophilic tendencies, and the magnetic ability to gather around him the most interesting sort of characters. Mr. Penumbra is a wizened old proprietor of a very strange bookstore. For one thing, Penumbra’s actual supply of salable books is minimal. Sure, he carries some essentials - Steinbeck, Tolkien, Borges, and Murakami; he’s got Steve Jobs’ biography and five books about the celebrated physicist Richard Feynman.

But this only fills a small area in the front of the bookstore. It’s in the back - where shelves that reach heavenward are navigable only by giant, wheeled ladders - where the real action is.

Of course it doesn’t seem much like action to Clay, who has recently taken a job as the night clerk of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. Mostly it seems like a small group of rather eccentric individuals arriving in succession to borrow books that, upon first blush, are utterly illegible, and then upon closer inspection are, well, still utterly illegible.

But curiosity - his own and that of Kat, his new hacker girlfriend - gets the better of Clay, and pretty soon he and Kat (who, not incidentally, is a data visualization designer at Google), along with Neel Shah, Clay’s Dungeon Master buddy from sixth grade and "the world’s leading expert on boob physics," and Mr. Penumbra (himself) are on a mission to crack open the secrets of a 500-year-old bibliophilic cult based upon the work of Venetian printer Aldus Manutius (an actual historical figure) and typeface designer, Griffo Gerritszoon (fictional).

The idea for Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore began in 2008, when Robin Sloan read the following tweet:

just misread '24hr bookdrop' as '24hr bookshop'. the disappointment is beyond words. (link)

The idea of a 24-Hour bookstore fascinated him, and he stored it away in the recesses of his gray matter where it gestated, and eventually emerged as a short story that he published for the Kindle in 2009.

Sloan’s dual tendencies towards writing and technology led him down a unique path as an emerging author. Prior to publishing Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, he leveraged the support of a fanbase he’d won as founder and blogger of Snarkmarket.com to publish a novella using Kickstarter. His success with Annabel Scheme along with the positive reception of his Penumbra short story led Sloan eventually to write the novel

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is a good story, well told, and Sloan’s fans have gone as far to throw around comparisons to Neal Stephenson, but (unless my assessment is colored by years of positive recollections) Penumbra is no Snow Crash. It’s lighter fair, uncomplicated by the kind of world-building for which Stephenson is well known, and I would liken it to another book that merged the beauty of the analog with that of the digital, one also set partially within a corporate campus - Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs.

Like Coupland, Sloan includes an assortment of techy references in his story - our heros employ the online crowd-sourcing of Hadoop and Mechanical Turk and much of the plot centers around book-scanning, particularly by Google. And if there’s one place that Penumbra really shines it’s in the interplay between these two opposing worlds - the high tech and the antiquarian, so that ultimately, they are not at all in opposition, but simply different keys, methodologies, approaches to the solving the same puzzle - the human condition.

It didn’t take much for me to want to read this book (I was sold on the title alone), but if you need more convincing, you can get a taste of the tale by reading the short story, "Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore."



Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.