47 pages • 1 hour read
Robin Sloan, Rodrigo CorralMr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: The Bookstore
Chapter 1 Summary: Help Wanted
In the first chapter we are introduced to the novel’s protagonist, Clay Jannon, who has recently lost his job as a designer for NewBagel as a result of the economic recession. It was his first job after finishing art school and it “hadn’t lasted long enough to build my portfolio or even get particularly good at anything” (6). Clay takes to walking around San Francisco reading help-wanted ads and, on one of these walks, he stumbles across Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, which has a Help Wanted sign in the window. Despite his conviction that “’24-hour bookstore’ was a euphemism for something” (7), Clay applies for the job of night clerk. Mr. Penumbra, the store’s owner, asks him about a book he loves, and Clay tells him about The Dragon-Song Chronicles, a series of books he has read three times. Pleased with his answer, Penumbra then asks, “But can you climb a ladder?” (10), which leads to Clay’s first terrifying experience of retrieving a book that is three floors above ground level.
Chapter 2 Summary: Coat Buttons
One month later, Clay can “go up and down that ladder like a monkey” (11). He enjoys his job but there are very few customers, so that he feels “more like a night watchman than a clerk” (12). The store sells a random assortment of used books in excellent condition and Clay plans to use his previous experience at NewBagel to devise a marketing campaign that will improve Mr. Penumbra’s profitability. However, Mr. Penumbra’s store is divided into a “normal” section and an “other” section. The “other” section, which Clay calls the Waybacklist, is held on the dizzyingly high shelves at the back of the store and “is comprised of volumes that, as far as Google knows, don’t exist” (16). Similarly, there is a second set of customers for this second set of books, “a small community of people who orbit the store like strange moons” (16). These customers don’t buy the books on the Waybacklist, they borrow them, one book at a time, and Clay wonders if they are all part of a strange book club. Clay doesn’t know what kind of books are in the Waybacklist—it’s one of his three job requirements never to “browse, read or otherwise inspect the shelved volumes” (18). The other two requirements are that he must be at the store between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. exactly and that he must keep a precise and detailed written record of all transactions—right down to what kind of buttons Mr. Tyndall’s coat has. Despite these strange requirements, Clay needs the job badly, so he doesn’t question them.
Chapter 3 Summary: Matropolis
In the third chapter, we are introduced to some of the other people in Clay’s life. As well as Mr. Penumbra, who takes the morning shift, Clay shares responsibility for the store with Oliver Grone, a graduate student at Berkeley who is training to be a museum curator. Working the night shift means that Clay keeps odd hours, but so does his roommate, Matthew Mittlebrand, who is a special effects artist. Mat prefers to build things with his hands than use computer graphics and his current project, Matropolis, is “a scaled-down dreamscape, a bright glittering hyper-city” (23) that is gradually taking over their living room. Clay thought this would be a problem for their other roommate, Ashley, but luckily both “share a deep appreciation for details” (25) and so their living situation remains harmonious. Mat’s visit to the store one night prompts Clay to break the first rule of his job: opening one of the books from the Waybacklist reveals “a solid matrix of letters, a blanket of glyphs with hardly a trace of white space” (29). The arrival of a customer—Federov—interrupts their investigation of the strange books and Clay is further distracted from the mystery by Mat’s revelation of his romantic feelings for Ashley.
Chapter 1 – Chapter 3 Analysis
The opening chapters of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore introduce us to the novel’s protagonist, Clay Jannon, an affable young art graduate who has recently lost his job. Having previously worked for NewBagel, a company started by a “pair of ex-Googlers” (4), Clay’s employment at Mr. Penumbra’s bookstore represents a move away from, and provides a contrast to, the digital marketplace. This change helps to delineate the novel’s interest in the relationship between books and technology in contemporary society. Clay’s unemployment also serves to suggest that while new technologies are creating new opportunities for people, they don’t always lead to stable futures, while the name of Mr. Penumbra’s store—the 24-Hour Bookstore—suggests a sense of permanence: like the books it sells, the store will always be there.
Clay’s sense of displacement as he moves from the world of online marketing to the world of books is reinforced by his sense that there are two parts to Penumbra’s store: a normal part and an “other” part. Clay’s reluctance to investigate what he calls the “Waybacklist” creates an atmosphere of suspense for the reader. The introduction of Clay’s roommate Mat helps in the development of this storyline, as Mat opens one of the books from the Waybacklist and shows it to Clay. The revelations of the encrypted text not only confirms that there is a mystery in need of solving but, also, creates an oblique comparison between these books and computer code that disrupts any complete distinction between books and newer forms of technology.
The character of Mat, a special effects artist who shuns computer graphics in favor of working with his hands, also introduces an idea that will recur throughout the novel: that older and manual ways of doing things remain valuable even when there are digital alternatives. The novel is not so much interested in determining whether new technologies are “better” than old ones as it is concerned with how we can negotiate the relationship between them and use all of the resources available to us to our advantage. Mat and Clay’s brief conversation at the end of the third chapter about Mat’s romantic feelings for Ashley, leave Clay wondering, “What else is hiding in plain sight” (32). This question is raised repeatedly throughout Sloan’s novel and can be read as a comment about the importance of living mindfully and paying close attention to the world we live in, rather than allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed by the noise of the digital world.
