Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, #1)

by Robin Sloan

As someone who has been in the business of bookselling for fifty years, I can say that the main thing Robin Sloan gets right about bookselling is the magic. From the day that the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened City Lights Bookstore in 1953, I don’t think there’s been any diminishment in that magic. In fact, I think it’s never been more prevalent. An independent bookstore is really a nexus of portals that can take readers into all these different experiences of worlds and of language. As booksellers, we can direct readers to doors that, without us, they never would have known existed. Through our own reading experience and our conversations and connections with a vast array of other booksellers, with publishers and editors, with writers, we’re like preindustrial navigators. We don’t really have a language for this, but bookselling is not just pure subjectivity; it’s a series of very pointillistic, empirical observations that guide our explorations, and allow us to guide our readers’ explorations. And that, in narrative terms, is what I think Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore captures so well. It’s … magic.

to bring the right books to the right readers.

We are living through one of the most exciting times in literary history. There are ups and downs, of course, little cycles within cycles, but the continuum over the last fifty years has shown literature getting consistently better and better.

If there’s any secret I’ve learned as a bookseller, it’s to trust the readers to rise to the challenges we bring them, and to want to keep exploring; our most important work as independent booksellers, I think, is to bring them the work that’s not obvious, and to understand that readers have more potential than they even understand they have themselves.

if writers in the past decade have come to understand race and class and how culture is made in ways that are unprecedented, so too have readers. And I do believe that future literary historians will look back at this time as a moment when literature matches and even leads transformations that are happening on a global scale.

LOST IN THE SHADOWS of the shelves, I almost fall off the ladder. I am exactly halfway up. The floor of the bookstore is far below me, the surface of a planet I’ve left behind. The tops of the shelves loom high above, and it’s dark up there—the books are packed in close, and they don’t let any light through. The air might be thinner, too. I think I see a bat. I am holding on for dear life, one hand on the ladder, the other on the lip of a shelf, fingers pressed white. My eyes trace a line above my knuckles, searching the spines—and there, I spot it. The book I’m looking for.

I’d sit at my kitchen table and start scanning help-wanted ads on my laptop, but then a browser tab would blink and I’d get distracted and follow a link to a long magazine article about genetically modified wine grapes. Too long, actually, so I’d add it to my reading list. Then I’d follow another link to a book review. I’d add the review to my reading list, too, then download the first chapter of the book—third in a series about vampire police. Then, help-wanted ads forgotten, I’d retreat to the living room, put my laptop on my belly, and read all day.

At first I had insisted I would only work at a company with a mission I believed in. Then I thought maybe it would be fine as long as I was learning something new. After that I decided it just couldn’t be evil. Now I was carefully delineating my personal definition of evil.

It was paper that saved me. It turned out that I could stay focused on job hunting if I got myself away from the internet, so I would print out a ream of help-wanted ads, drop my phone in a drawer, and go for a walk. I’d crumple up the ads that required too much experience and deposit them in dented green trash cans along the way, and so by the time I’d exhausted myself and hopped on a bus back home, I’d have two or three promising prospectuses folded in my back pocket, ready for follow-up.

San Francisco is a good place for walks if your legs are strong. The city is a tiny square punctuated by steep hills and bounded on three sides by water, and as a result, there are surprise vistas everywhere. You’ll be walking along, minding your own business with a fistful of printouts, and suddenly the ground will fall away and you’ll see straight down to the bay, with the buildings lit up orange and pink along the way. San Francisco’s architectural style didn’t really make inroads anywhere else in the country, and even when you live here and you’re used to it, it lends the vistas a strangeness: all the tall narrow houses, the windows like eyes and teeth, the wedding-cake filigree. And looming behind it all, if you’re facing the right direction, you’ll see the rusty ghost of the Golden Gate Bridge.

This place was absurdly narrow and dizzyingly tall, and the shelves went all the way up—three stories of books, maybe more. I craned my neck back (why do bookstores always make you do uncomfortable things with your neck?) and the shelves faded smoothly into the shadows in a way that suggested they might just go on forever.

The shelves were packed close together, and it felt like I was standing at the border of a forest—not a friendly California forest, either, but an old Transylvanian forest, a forest full of wolves and witches and dagger-wielding bandits all waiting just beyond moonlight’s reach. There were ladders that clung to the shelves and rolled side to side. Usually those seem charming, but here, stretching up into the gloom, they were ominous. They whispered rumors of accidents in the dark.

If this sounds impressive to you, you’re over thirty.

Kat spends most of her time at Google. Most of her friends work at Google. Most of her conversations revolve around Google. Now I am learning that most of her calories come from Google. I think it’s impressive: she’s smart and enthusiastic about her work.

Let me give you some advice: make friends with a millionaire when he’s a friendless sixth-grader. Neel Shah has plenty of friends—investors, employees, other entrepreneurs—but on some level they know, and he knows, that they are friends with Neel Shah, CEO. By contrast, I am, and always will be, friends with Neel Shah, dungeon master.

When I was a kid reading fantasy novels, I daydreamed about hot girl wizards. I never thought I’d actually meet one, but that’s only because I didn’t realize wizards were going to walk among us and we’d just call them Googlers.

“You’ve got to start thinking differently,” Kat clucks, shaking her head. “This is one of the things you learn at Google. Stuff that used to be hard … just isn’t hard anymore.”

Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines—it’s hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.

These days, the phone only carries bad news. It’s all “your student loan is past due” and “your uncle Chris is in the hospital.” If it’s anything fun or exciting, like an invitation to a party or a secret project in the works, it will come through the internet.

And then, on a sunny Friday morning, for three seconds, you can’t search for anything. You can’t check your email. You can’t watch any videos. You can’t get directions. For just three seconds, nothing works, because every single one of Google’s computers around the world is dedicated to this task.

There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care. All the secrets in the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight. It takes forty-one seconds to climb a ladder three stories tall. It’s not easy to imagine the year 3012, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. We have new capabilities now—strange powers we’re still getting used to. The mountains are a message from Aldrag the Wyrm-Father. Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in.

A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.