I adored this book. In fact, I loved Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore so much that I couldn’t pick a book to follow it. I wanted to stay in that world for just a little bit longer. This book was billed as the ultimate book for bibliophiles in a lot of the reviews I read. While I agree with that to a certain extent, this book is really about the intersection between the book and technology. This book is very much about what’s happening right now, to the point where it has references to xkcd and Hadoop and crowdsourcing. The action takes place on the Google campus almost as much as it does in bookstores and libraries.
Our narrator, Clay Jannon, finds himself out of work after the bagel shop he did web design and social marketing for goes out of business. After much searching, he lands a job at Mr. Penumbra’s shop. The entire interview consists of one question, “Tell me about a book that you loved.” Jannon shares his love for a trilogy of fantasy novels written some twenty plus years before the opening of this novel, the sort of pulpy adventure novels that a lot of us have fond memories of. Clay is hired on the spot and his training consists of learning odd rules like retrieving books for members, not peeking into those books, and doing everything exactly as he’s been told.
Of course, Clay has the kind of personality that won’t leave little mysteries uninvestigated. Clay uses his Ruby skills to model the book store. He starts to see patterns in how the members are working their way through what he calls the Waybacklist, books that appear to be entirely unique–no ISBNs, no records in the Library of Congress. The books are encoded, full of dense puzzles. Shortly after he starts at Mr. Penumbra’s Clay meets a woman who works for Google, Kat Potente. Kat encourages him to use Google’s book scanner to copy one of the mysterious log books that track the members progress through the Waybacklist.
When Mr. Penumbra finds out about this, he’s not angry as Clay expected. Instead, Penumbra lets Clay and Kat into the bigger mystery. Mr. Penumbra and the members of his bookstore are using the coded books (similar to the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the Voynich manuscript, but with more math) to try and learn to decode the unsolvable codex vitae of the publisher Aldus Manutius. According to legend, Manutius discovered the secret of immortality and left behind an empty tomb. Since that time, members of the Unbroken Spine (the name of the organization) have been trying to crack the code. With Clay and Kat’s help–and with the help of Google’s supercomputers–Penumbra thinks they might have a chance to finally break Manutius’ code.
As if the plot weren’t enough for me, Sloan takes care to create rich settings. You can almost smell the dust and eau d’old book of Penumbra’s shop and the Unbroken Spine library. I was torn between racing through the book to see what happened next and lingering over the descriptions of strange books, ancient libraries, and fiendish codes. I think the thing I really loved about this book was that it wasn’t just an elegy for books. Instead, Sloan shows that nooks and kindles and Google aren’t the end of the book. It might be the end of the codex, but it’s certainly not the end of the novel or of writing. In fact, by embracing technology, we might see new possibilities and formats open up.
Of course, the irony of reading this book in kindle format was not lost on me.