I read almost exclusively on my Kobo. My journey into digital reading began way back on a Palm III, scrolling pixelated lines of Neuromancer in green-on-green. The convenience, the portability, the way ebooks vanish into your pocket until you summon them again—it’s magic. And yet, Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is a celebration of books-as-objects, books-as-culture, books-as-secret-society, and somehow, I loved every page of it.
The novel is, at its core, a love letter to the written word in all its forms—old and new, dusty and digital. It wraps its narrative arms around the tension between Gutenberg and Google, as if trying to reconcile the mystery of the past with the speed of the future. And for anyone who swoons at the idea of an obscure typeface that holds the key to immortality (guilty), it delivers a heady rush. Yes, a typeface—fictional, ornate, and plot-critical. It’s a conceit so nerdily delightful I could barely contain my joy. There’s something beautiful about a book that dares to ask: what if fonts had secrets?
The story is split between two modes: one foot in the dusty mystique of the titular bookstore and its secret society of knowledge seekers, and the other in Silicon Valley’s gleaming optimism, with data visualizations, startups, and mechanical turks. It’s a tale of two stories—old and new, romantic and rational. And this tension gives the novel its heartbeat.
But while the machinery of the book is exhilarating—the puzzle-box structure, the reverence for old knowledge housed in quirky corners of a 24-hour shop—I found the characters just a touch too sanded down. Clay, the narrator, is amiable enough, but he’s more lens than force. His companions—a Google engineer girlfriend, a D&D-loving best friend turned tech millionaire—sketch out archetypes more than they inhabit lives. It’s not that they’re unbelievable; it’s that they don’t hum with the same electricity as the world around them.
And what a world it is. Sloan’s imagination is capacious, yet lovingly detailed. The bookstore itself is enchanting: narrow, shadowy, and steeped in possibility. You half-expect Borges to be napping in the corner or for a secret door to open behind a stack of illuminated manuscripts. It’s this atmosphere that lingers—the sense that you, too, might walk into a forgotten shop one night and find yourself swept into a conspiracy of typography and timelessness.
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is a novel for book lovers, sure. And maybe even more so, it’s a novel for format lovers, for those of us who thrill at the medium as much as the message. Even with its occasional character flatness, the book remains a joyous meditation on curiosity, technology, and the enduring power of story. It reminds me why I fell in love with reading in the first place.