Read Time: 3 Minutes
I stumbled upon this tale because of the narrator, Ari Fliakos who I quite enjoyed listening to recently. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore blends new technology, a centuries-old secret society of codebreakers and quirky old bookshops into an entertaining and satisfying urban mystery. While a little heavy on the tech, the overall story is intriguing and kept me listening until my earbud’s batteries were drained.
The story follows Clay Jannon, a recently out-of-work IT guy in San Francisco. While looking for a new job, he chances upon a help wanted sign at a 24-hour bookstore. The owner, Mr Penumbra, is an older gentleman with various quirks that fit the bookstore which is equally strange. Shelves that are three stories tall and packed with books, and a mysterious section of books he’s not allowed to open.
Hardly anyone actually visits the bookstore which gets Clay wondering how they stay in business. The section of forbidden books is the only place that gets repeat customers, who can borrow one book at a time, and Clay has to be meticulous about recording everything about the transaction, down to the colour of their socks or what kind of buttons they had on their jacket.
Things start to get interesting for Clay when he looks at one of the forbidden books. From there, he enlists the help of his oldest friend and new girlfriend who works at Google to help crack open the mystery.
With a reasonable background in IT, the techy stuff in the book didn’t bother me too much, however I can’t help but think it’d be off-putting for a lot of the potential audience of this book. Some of it strays into the territory of jargon for jargon’s sake. Things like data visualisation techniques and hadoop distributed computing, and a general feeling of a Google press release at times to give some examples.
While it does highlight the divide between the old-school manual code-cracking of the strange people who are borrowing the books and the advanced technological resources that Google could bring to bear on the same problem, it felt for me a little heavy-handed.
All that aside, the overall premise was fun, and the cracking of a 500-year-old mystery left behind by Aldus Manutius – a Renaissance-era printer of rare texts and publishing innovator – and Francesco Griffo, a punchcutter who created typefaces (fonts) still in use today, added a fun historical layer to the story
The narration by Ari Fliakos was excellent. As stated above, his narration of a previous listen was why I found this book. Good pacing and no production issues that I noticed, which is of particular note because this was released in 2013. Older audiobooks can be a bit hit-or-miss when it comes to quality, but this was well done.
Partly Da Vinci Code mixed with National Treasure, filled with quirky and unique characters, and intriguing mystery, and a satisfying ending. At just over seven and a half hours, it’s a little short, but it’s still an enjoyable listen and fantastic world that I’d happily revisit.