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

by Robin Sloan

Venice is where he met Aldus Manutius. SLIDE 5 It was at Manutius’s printing house that Gerritszoon found his place in the world.

just like the internet today, printing in the fifteenth century was all problems, all the time:

Manutius entrusted Gerritszoon with the key to this encrypted history. But something got lost in translation over five hundred years. Gerritszoon didn’t get the key. Gerritszoon is the key.

Do you see the tiny notches in the edge of the letter? They look like the teeth of a gear, don’t they?—or the teeth of a key.

That’s the code, right there. Those tiny notches.

Nobody in the fellowship’s five-hundred-year history thought to look this closely. Neither did any of Google’s code-breakers. We were looking at digitized text in a different typeface entirely. We were looking at the sequence, not the shape.

all you have to do is count the notches,

The iPhone comes loaded with Gerritszoon. Every new Microsoft Word document defaults to Gerritszoon. The Guardian sets headlines in Gerritszoon; so do Le Monde and the Hindustan Times. The Encyclopædia Britannica used to be set in Gerritszoon; Wikipedia

Thank you, Teobaldo You are my greatest friend This has been the key to everything

friendship theme

What if the best part of him was the shapes he could make with metal? That part of him really is immortal. It’s as immortal as anything’s going to get.” She shakes

“Clark Moffat figured this out,” I tell him. “I have no idea how, but he did. And then I guess he just … decided to play along.

“This city of ours—it has taken me too long to realize it, but we are in the Venice of this world. The Venice.”

we’ll form a consultancy: a special-ops squad for companies operating at the intersection of books and technology, trying to solve the mysteries that gather in the shadows of digital shelves.

penumbra and jan

“What do you seek in this engagement?”

Ashley will dismantle the shelves, refinish the floor, put in new lights, and transform the bookstore into a climbing gym.

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. After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this: 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.