From the Penumbra-verse

Having enjoyed Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, I long ago subscribed to his newsletter.

This week he tells of a mysterious little book, Iterating Grace, that is cropping up in mailboxes around San Francisco.

It's a neat little story, and completely in line with Penumbra, fetishizing bookish artifacts while embracing the digital future.

In Silicon Valley, so many people had collaborated to create so much, only to watch it crumble and wonder how real it had ever been. For a lot of tech workers, this only led to despondency and debt. But Crooks seemed to find the dot-com economy's impermanence electrifying. Start-ups, he realized, were a kind of spiritual exercise. He wanted to live that experience again, but in the purest possible form. He wanted to "touch the ESSENCE without gloves," as he put it in the summer of 2003, in an email to his uncle.

Quite apart from, Who is Koons Crooks and how did he get here?, Iterating Grace comes wrapped in an enigma of its own: who wrote it?

The short book has been digitized — it's a quick and interesting read. And Alexis Madrigal details the circumstances of the book.

Old knowledge, new knowledge

"I told them about Manutius."

She did it.

"How it's this amazing ancient book, totally a historical treasure, totally old knowledge, OK — "

She actually did it.

" — and then I explained how there's this nonprofit that's trying to break the code — "

"Nonprofit?"

"It sounds better than, like, secret society. Anyway, I said they're trying to break the code, and of course people perked up at that, because everybody at Google likes codes —"

Books: boring. Codes: awesome. These are the people who are running the internet.

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, by Robin Sloan, was one of the best Christmas presents ever (thanks, bro!)! [Along with all the movie-watching you enabled!] [And the amazing red velvet bed cover (thanks, sis!)!]

This is not serious Literature, but there's so much love in it, for books, for codes, for secret societies, for the internet, for quests, for fonts, for obscure skillsets, for interconnectedness, for secret passageways built into bookshelves.

Mostly what I love about it this story is simply the intersection of old books with new technology. Because they don't have to be mutually exclusive.

This was the perfect holiday read — the kind of book you sneak off to read a chapter or two of for a few quiet moments away from the hecticity, the kind that helps a long journey pass easily, the kind that makes me wish I worked in a crazy weird bookstore.

Also, it turns out that Manutius is an actual historical figure, believed to have been the first typographer to use a semicolon.

I have waited my whole life

Deckles stands, straightens his robe, braces himself, and gives the shelves behind the desk a sharp shove. They swivel smoothly and silently — it's as if they're weightless, drifting in space — and as they draw apart, they reveal a shadowed space beyond, where wide steps curl down into darkness. Deckles stretches an arm to invite us forward. "Festina lente," he says matter-of-factly.

Neel takes a sharp breath and I know exactly what it means. It means: I have waited my whole life to walk through a secret passage built into a bookshelf.

— from Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, by Robin Sloan.

The penumbra of coincidence

(I love that word — penumbra.)

By some coincidence I happened to bookmark a couple items to check on later and on that later inspection they turned out to be related,

the first being Summer Reading, "a Reading Rainbow-esque video series" for grown-ups about books that this guy loves (although the series to date consists of just one video) and it's clear that his enthusiasm for books is genuine,

and the second being a mention and summary of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, which title is fabulous for the dual reason of "penumbra" and "24-hour bookstore" (aah! <- [sigh of pleasure]) and which I immediately added to my wishlist.

And these items are connected in this way:

Both the video series and the novel are by one Robin Sloan.

Read "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore" — the utterly charming story on which the novel is based, featuring a night clerk at the titular shop whose job requirements include:

"You must keep precise records of all purchases. Time. Amount. The customer's appearance. His state of mind. How he asks for the book. How he receives it. Does he appear to be injured. Is he wearing a sprig of rosemary on his hat. And so on."