{"id":682,"date":"2012-09-20T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-09T20:31:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/?p=682"},"modified":"2024-12-31T17:13:09","modified_gmt":"2024-12-31T04:13:09","slug":"mr-penumbras-24-hour-book-store","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2012\/09\/20\/mr-penumbras-24-hour-book-store\/","title":{"rendered":"Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Book Store"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Robin Sloan<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Text<\/em> Publishing<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Otago Daily Times, September 20th 2012<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Mr Penumbra\u2019s 24-hour Bookstore <\/em>is a wonderfully light and frothy fable that celebrates, among other things, the enduring power of friendship and the joys of a good book. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When out-of-work art graduate Clay Jannon starts work on the graveyard shift at Mr Penumbra\u2019s store, he sees it as something to do until he finds a real job.\u00a0 Indeed, it is a wonder that the business survives at all; the selection of popular fiction is both small and eclectic, with the vast bulk of the store dedicated to massive tomes written in incomprehensible language with titles like KRESIMIR and ERDOS. Similarly, most customers \u00ad\u00adcome not to buy but to borrow, and are as curious a collection of individuals as the books themselves.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To while away the hours between 10.00pm and dawn, Clay starts to explore the contents of the shelves, creating a map of their contents and borrowing habits of their readers on his computer. This quickly reveals a pattern in their selection, a discovery that initiates him into a mysterious society called the Unbroken Spine. Members of the order have spent hundreds of years dedicated to deciphering the codex vitae<\/em> of a 15th<\/sup> Century printer called Aldus Manutius in the belief that it contains the secret of immortality.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Intrigued, Clay enlists the help of a group of his friends and all the forces of modern data analysis (up to and including the entire computing power of Google) to solving the code, an approach that is anathema to the group\u2019s leader, who insists the solution must be pursued only by traditional means.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As with all good quests the hero eventually prevails, and although individual readers will differ in how satisfactory they find Manutius\u2019s secret when it is finally revealed, the journey to uncover it is great fun. The author, Robin Sloan, obviously believes both in the enduring nature of story and the potential for new forms of presentation, from e-readers to print-on-demand publishing runs, to enhance rather than supplant the old-fashioned hard book. This is evident in the delight he takes in his own tale, and I for one hope he is right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robin Sloan
\n
\nOtago Daily Times review September 20th 2012<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[153,370,18,175,407],"class_list":["post-682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-153","tag-fiction","tag-odt","tag-robin-sloan","tag-speculative-sci-fi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=682"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1556,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682\/revisions\/1556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}