Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

Secret societies and the quest for immortality, ancient books, old printing houses, underground reading rooms, dusty warehouses of lost artifacts and shiny data vaults of Google, jaw-breaking ciphers, data visualization, a real quest, true friendship, promising love and, strangely enough, dragons. All of this fell into the lap of web designer Clay Jannon, because after losing his job and aimlessly wandering around San Francisco, he inadvertently turned into a 24-hour (and, by the way, vertical) bookstore. He immediately became a salesperson there, who sells nothing — only hands out mysterious volumes of unreadable gibberish to clearly obsessed people in exchange for other equally unreadable volumes. In the middle of the night. Of course, Clay will try to figure out what is happening at Mr. Penumbra's store. Naturally, it will turn out that there is a centuries-old secret hidden here, an ancient undeciphered cipher. And this cipher, along with Clay, will be cracked by coders and librarians, archaeologists and designers, hackers and museum curators, special effects creators and climbers. "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore" appeared on the bestseller lists of The New York Times and National Public Radio, was recognized as Book of the Year by Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and NPR right after its publication, and later released in over thirty countries. This book is a tribute to Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Haruki Murakami, Dan Brown, and early Umberto Eco, but mainly to the futurological theories of Robin Sloan himself, who easily reconciles the devotees of the analog world of paper books with the inhabitants of the intangible digital universe, simply because he sees no contradictions between them. The analog world and the digital world are amazing, kind, and full of mysteries. We were born to solve them — together with all the ones we love, if possible. The novel "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore" and its prehistory, the story "Ajax Penumbra 1969", are published in a new translation and for the first time under one cover.