If there's anything unlikelier than a spy-funded magazine, it's Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, the ladder-strewn repository of old volumes at the heart of Robin Sloan's good-hearted, engaging fable.
The San Francisco bookstore is open for any late-night literary emergencies. Crazed bookworms appear at 2 a.m to borrow the next volume in what new night clerk Clay Jannon calls “the Waybacklist,” coded volumes stretching three stories hidden behind the store's more conventional wares, which run to Steinbeck and Tolkien but not Rowling.
“His inventory is eclectic, there's no evidence of pattern or purpose other than, I suppose, his own personal taste,” Clay explains. “So, no teenage wizards or vampire police here. That's a shame, because this is exactly the kind of store that makes you want to buy a book about a teenage wizard. This is the kind of store that makes you want to be a teenage wizard.”
Former web designer Clay moved into the growth field of independent bookstores after the recession killed off his last employer, a bagel chain. “I was also the voice of @NewBagel on Twitter and attracted a few hundred followers with a mix of breakfast trivia and digital coupons.”
Needless to say, his character falls into the “lovable loser” category.
After spying the ad in Craigslist, Clay was skeptical: “I was pretty sure '24-hour bookstore' was a euphemism for something. It was on Broadway, in a euphemistic part of town.” Then he meets Mr. Penumbra, a Dumbledore-type figure with twinkly eyes who calls Clay "my boy," and clambers up his first ladder.
Aside from the codebreakers, Clay has a lot of time on his hands. In an effort to bring in some paying customers, he tries to launch a marketing campaign centered around likely clientele: cash-carrying night owls who like Wes Anderson movies and aren't allergic to dust. This brings in a total of one: Kat, a cheerful genius who works at Google and with whom Clay is instantly entranced. In his spare time, he builds a 3-D model of the store and inadvertently cracks a code others spent years unraveling.
With Kat's help, Penumbra and Clay harness the power of the Internet to solve a 500-year-old puzzle.
“A fellowship of secret scholars spent 500 years on this task. Now we're penciling it for a Friday morning,” Clay observes.
There are black-robed cultists, underground libraries, a search for immortality, and odes to fictional typefaces. Sloan, a former Twitter media manager, also includes plenty of sly asides about Silicon Valley: One of Google's projects, for example, is “developing a form of renewable energy that runs on hubris.” Clay's best friend Neel, a former Dungeon Master and fellow devotee of “The Dragon-Song Chronicles" is geek enough to drop everything in pursuit of a righteous quest, especially one that comes equipped with hidden passageways.
Sloan's debut mystery is fast-paced, light-hearted, and flat-out fun. As Clay uses technology to embrace his inner Luddite, he proves that the printing press is mightier than the app. (This is fantasy, after all.)
