Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore (2 page)

That was a good line, and for some reason, it made me feel comfortable. I asked, “Am I speaking to Mr. Penumbra?”

“I am Penumbra”—he nodded—“and I am the custodian of this place.”

I didn’t quite realize I was going to say it until I did: “I’m looking for a job.”

Penumbra blinked once, then nodded and tottered over to the desk set beside the front door. It was a massive block of dark-whorled wood, a solid fortress on the forest’s edge. You could probably defend it for days in the event of a siege from the shelves.

“Employment.” Penumbra nodded again. He slid up onto the chair behind the desk and regarded me across its bulk. “Have you ever worked at a bookstore before?”

“Well,” I said, “when I was in school I waited tables at a seafood restaurant, and the owner sold his own cookbook.” It was called
The Secret Cod
and it detailed thirty-one different ways to— You get it. “That probably doesn’t count.”

“No, it does not, but no matter,” Penumbra said. “Prior experience in the book trade is of little use to you here.”

Wait—maybe this place really was all erotica. I glanced down and around, but glimpsed no bodices, ripped or otherwise. In fact, just next to me there was a stack of dusty Dashiell Hammetts on a low table. That was a good sign.

“Tell me,” Penumbra said, “about a book you love.”

I knew my answer immediately. No competition. I told him, “Mr. Penumbra, it’s not one book, but a series. It’s not the best writing and it’s probably too long and the ending is terrible, but I’ve read it three times, and I met my best friend because we were both obsessed with it back in sixth grade.” I took a breath. “I love
The Dragon-Song Chronicles
.”

Penumbra cocked an eyebrow, then smiled. “That is good, very good,” he said, and his smile grew, showing jostling white teeth. Then he squinted at me, and his gaze went up and down. “But can you climb a ladder?”

*   *   *

And that is how I find myself on this ladder, up on the third floor, minus the floor, of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. The book I’ve been sent up to retrieve is called
AL-ASMARI
and it’s about 150 percent of one arm-length to my left. Obviously, I need to return to the floor and scoot the ladder over. But down below, Penumbra is shouting, “Lean, my boy! Lean!”

And wow, do I ever want this job.

COAT BUTTONS

S
O THAT WAS A MONTH AGO
. Now I’m the night clerk at Penumbra’s, and I go up and down that ladder like a monkey. There’s a real technique to it. You roll the ladder into place, lock its wheels, then bend your knees and leap directly to the third or fourth rung. You pull with your arms to keep your momentum going, and in a moment you’re already five feet in the air. As you’re climbing, you look straight ahead, not up or down; you keep your eyes focused about a foot in front of your face and you let the books zoom by in a blur of colorful spines. You count the rungs in your head, and finally, when you’re at the right level, reaching for the book you’ve come up to retrieve … why, of course, you lean.

As a professional capability, this might not be as marketable as web design, but it’s probably more fun, and at this point I’ll take anything I can get.

I only wish I had to use my new skill more often. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore does not operate around the clock due to an overwhelming number of customers. In fact, there are hardly any, and sometimes I feel more like a night watchman than a clerk.

Penumbra sells used books, and they are in such uniformly excellent condition that they might as well be new. He buys them during the day—you can only sell to the man with his name on the windows—and he must be a tough customer. He doesn’t seem to pay much attention to the bestseller lists. His inventory is eclectic; there’s no evidence of pattern or purpose other than, I suppose, his own personal taste. So, no teenage wizards or vampire police here. That’s a shame, because this is exactly the kind of store that makes you want to buy a book about a teenage wizard. This is the kind of store that makes you want to
be
a teenage wizard.

I’ve told my friends about Penumbra’s, and a few of them have stopped in to ogle the shelves and watch me climb into the dusty heights. I’ll usually cajole them into buying something: a Steinbeck novel, some Borges stories, a thick Tolkien tome—all of those authors evidently of interest to Penumbra, because he stocks the complete works of each. At the minimum, I’ll send my friends packing with a postcard. There’s a pile of them on the front desk. They show the front of the store in pen and ink—a fine-lined design so old and uncool that it’s become cool again—and Penumbra sells them for a dollar each.

But a buck every few hours doesn’t pay my salary. I can’t figure out what does pay my salary. I can’t figure out what keeps this bookstore in business at all.

There’s a customer I’ve seen twice now, a woman who I am fairly certain works next door at Booty’s. I am fairly certain about this because both times her eyes were ringed raccoon-like with mascara and she smelled like smoke. She has a bright smile and dusty blond-brown hair. I can’t tell how old she is—she could be a tough twenty-three or a remarkable thirty-one—and I don’t know her name, but I do know she likes biographies.

On her first visit, she browsed the front shelves in a slow circle, scuffing her feet and doing absentminded stretches, then came up to the front desk. “D’you have the one about Steve Jobs?” she asked. She was wearing a puffy North Face jacket over a pink tank top and jeans, and her voice had a little twang in it.

I frowned and said, “Probably not. But let’s check.”

Penumbra has a database that runs on a decrepit beige Mac Plus. I pecked its creator’s name into the keyboard and the Mac made a low chime—the sound of success. She was in luck.

We tilted our heads to scan the
BIOGRAPHY
section and there it was: a single copy, shiny like new. Maybe it had been a Christmas present to a tech-executive dad who didn’t actually read books. Or maybe Tech Dad wanted to read it on his Kindle instead. In any case, somebody sold it here, and it passed Penumbra’s muster. Miraculous.

“He was so handsome,” North Face said, holding the book at arm’s length. Steve Jobs peered out of the white cover, hand on his chin, wearing round glasses that looked a bit like Penumbra’s.

A week later, she came hopping through the front door, grinning and silently clapping her hands—it made her seem more twenty-three than thirty-one—and said, “Oh, it was just great! Now listen”—here she got serious—“he wrote another one, about Einstein.” She held out her phone, which showed an Amazon product page for Walter Isaacson’s biography of Einstein. “I saw it on the internet but I thought maybe I could buy it here?”

Let’s be clear: This was incredible. This was a bookseller’s dream. This was a stripper standing athwart history, yelling,
Stop!
—and then we discovered, heads tilted hopefully, that Penumbra’s
BIOGRAPHY
section did not contain
Einstein: His Life and Universe
. There were five different books about Richard Feynman, but nothing at all about Albert Einstein. Thus spoke Penumbra.

“Really?” North Face pouted. “Shoot. Well, I guess I’ll buy it online. Thanks.” She wandered back out into the night, and so far she hasn’t returned.

Let me be candid. If I had to rank book-acquisition experiences in order of comfort, ease, and satisfaction, the list would go like this:

1. The perfect independent bookstore, like Pygmalion in Berkeley.

2. A big, bright Barnes & Noble. I know they’re corporate, but let’s face it—those stores are nice. Especially the ones with big couches.

3. The book aisle at Walmart. (It’s next to the potting soil.)

4. The lending library aboard the U.S.S.
West Virginia
, a nuclear submarine deep beneath the surface of the Pacific.

5. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.

So I set myself to righting the ship. No, I do not know anything about bookstore management. No, I do not have my finger on the pulse of the post-strip-club shopping crowd. No, I have never really righted any ships, unless you count the time I saved the Rhode Island School of Design fencing club from bankruptcy by organizing a twenty-four-hour Errol Flynn movie marathon. But I do know there are things that Penumbra is obviously doing wrong—things he isn’t doing at all.

Like marketing.

I have a plan: First I’ll prove myself with some small successes, then ask for a budget to place some print ads, put a few signs in the window, maybe even go big with a banner on the bus shelter just up the street:
WAITING FOR YOUR BUS? COME WAIT WITH US!
Then I’ll keep the bus schedule open on my laptop so I can give customers a five-minute warning when the next one is coming. It will be brilliant.

But I have to start small, and with no customers to distract me, I work hard. First, I connect to the unprotected Wi-Fi network next door called
bootynet
. Then I go one by one through the local review sites, writing glowing reports of this hidden gem. I send friendly emails with winking emoticons to local blogs. I create a Facebook group with one member. I sign up for Google’s hyper-targeted local advertising program—the same one we used at NewBagel—which allows you to identify your quarry with absurd precision. I choose characteristics from Google’s long form:

• lives in San Francisco

• likes books

• night owl

• carries cash

• not allergic to dust

• enjoys Wes Anderson movies

• recent GPS ping within five blocks of here

I only have ten dollars to spend on this, so I have to be specific.

That’s all the demand side. There’s also supply to think about, and Penumbra’s supply is capricious to say the least—but that’s only part of the story. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is, I have learned, really two stores in one.

There’s the more-or-less normal bookstore, which is up front, packed in tight around the desk. There are short shelves marked
HISTORY
and
BIOGRAPHY
and
POETRY
. There’s Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics
and Trevanian’s
Shibumi
. This more-or-less normal bookstore is spotty and frustrating, but at least it’s stocked with titles that you could find in a library or on the internet.

The other bookstore is stacked behind and above all that, on the tall laddered shelves, and it is comprised of volumes that, as far as Google knows, don’t exist. Trust me, I’ve searched. Many of these have the look of antiquity—cracked leather, gold-leaf titles—but others are freshly bound with bright crisp covers. So they’re not all ancient. They’re just all … unique.

I think of this as the Waybacklist.

When I started working here, I assumed they were just all from tiny presses. Tiny Amish presses with no taste for digital record-keeping. Or I thought maybe it was all self-published work—a whole collection of hand-bound one-offs that never made it to the Library of Congress or anywhere else. Maybe Penumbra’s was a kind of orphanage.

But now, a month into my clerkship, I’m starting to think it’s more complicated than that. You see, to go with the second store, there’s a second set of customers—a small community of people who orbit the store like strange moons. They are nothing like North Face. They are older. They arrive with algorithmic regularity. They never browse. They come wide awake, completely sober, and vibrating with need. For example:

The bell above the door will tinkle, and before it’s done, Mr. Tyndall will be shouting, breathless, “Kingslake! I need Kingslake!” He’ll take his hands off his head (has he really been running down the street with his hands on his head?) and clamp them down on the front desk. He will repeat it, as if he’s already told me once that my shirt is on fire, and why am I not taking swift action:

“Kingslake! Quickly!”

The database on the Mac Plus encompasses the regular books and the Waybacklist alike. The latter aren’t shelved according to title or subject (do they even have subjects?), so the computer assist is crucial. Now I will type K-I-N-G-S-L-A-K-E and the Mac will churn slowly—Tyndall bouncing on his heels—and then chime and show its cryptic response. Not
BIOGRAPHY
or
HISTORY
or
SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY
, but: 3-13. That’s the Waybacklist, aisle 3, shelf 13, which is only about ten feet up.

“Oh, thank goodness, thank you, yes, thank goodness,” Tyndall will say, ecstatic. “Here is my book”—he will produce a very large book from somewhere, possibly his pants; it will be the one he’s returning, exchanging for
KINGSLAKE
—“and here is my card.” He will slide a prim laminated card across the table, marked with the same symbol that graces the front windows. It will bear a cryptic code, stamped hard into the heavy paper, which I will record. Tyndall will be, as always, lucky number 6WNJHY. I will mistype it twice.

After I do my monkey business on the ladder, I will wrap
KINGSLAKE
in brown paper. I will try to make small talk: “How’s your night going, Mr. Tyndall?”

“Oh, very good, better now,” he will breathe, taking the package with shaking hands. “Making progress, slow, steady, sure!
Festina lente
, thank you, thank you!” Then the bell will tinkle again as he hurries back out into the street. It will be three in the morning.

*   *   *

Is this a book club? How do they join? Do they ever pay?

These are the things I ask myself when I sit here alone, after Tyndall or Lapin or Fedorov has left. Tyndall is probably the weirdest, but they’re all pretty weird: all graying, single-minded, seemingly imported from some other time or place. There are no iPhones. There’s no mention of current events or pop culture or anything, really, other than the books. I definitely think of them as a club, though I have no evidence that they know one another. Each comes in alone and never says a word about anything other than the object of his or her current, frantic fascination.

I don’t know what’s inside those books—and it’s part of my job not to know. After the ladder test, back on the day I was hired, Penumbra stood behind the front desk, gazed at me with bright blue eyes, and said: