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.