Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore

Description

By Robin Sloan

The recession pushes Clay Jannon out of a San Francisco web-design job and behind the counter of Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. The shop has almost no customers, and the few who come never buy anything: they borrow enormous, unreadable volumes from the back shelves, on a schedule, and return them.

Clay builds a model of the shop and its borrowing patterns to find out what is going on, and discovers a five-hundred-year-old secret society that has been working on the same problem for centuries without computers. A novel about old books and new machines, and which of them is better at remembering.

First published 2012