Ajax Penumbra 1969 (Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, #0.5)

by Robin Sloan

Books of silver; books of bone; and yet the strangest thing you see in all your years at Galvanic is a boy in a ski mask, sitting in a basement, using a computer.

“The measure of a bookstore is not its receipts, but its friends,” he says, “and here, we are rich indeed.”

APPENDIX Books on display in Al-Asmari’s 24-Hour Bookstore in September 1969, on the low table labeled MO’S PICKS: The High King, Lloyd Alexander I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou Naked Came the Stranger, Penelope Ashe The Edible Woman, Margaret Atwood

The Drowned World, J. G. Ballard In Watermelon Sugar, Richard Brautigan Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick The Secret Meaning of Things, Lawrence Ferlinghetti Fantastic Four #89, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin

The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer Behold the Man, Michael Moorcock Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth City of the Chasch, Jack Vance Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonne...