Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

I was impressed with “Night” last month.  I read the poignant story.  I devoured the history and meaning; even read more books on the subject.  It brought back visiting Yad Vashem.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG2QaN_LUao

 

This book captured my imagination, brought me back to the realities of today.  This is the new life in SillyConisco.  This was a fun venture into the craziness of Bay Area life, which reinforces the idea that we think we’re weird up here in Sonoma County. 

 

This book brought back so many memories of “City Lights” bookstore with its shelves to the ceiling and several floors, and the night-life people of North Beach.  All that stuff is mixed together with the High-Tech invasion of Googlers, Webinistas, and venture capitalists.  If I still lived on Upper Grant Avenue, I’d probably be Mr. Penumbra now, trying to learn Ruby[1].

 

I loved all the hi-tech gadgets and gizmos; nothing too Star-Trekkie, all believable.  I loved the character, Clay, with his make-a-list approach to all problems and with his almost autistic penchant for prime numbers, e.g. $2,357 in his bank account.  We had a monstrous book reader at IBM in the 80’s; it similarly took a team and a big room to operate.  IBM also had a private Internet in the early 80’s, just for developers.

 

The author is clever at weaving in some real things with total fiction.  I liked his Anatomix company of Neel’s, which is actually a basketball shoe manufacturer [Stephen Curry specials].  The main creative fiction was about the type font, Gerritszoon[2].  The footnote on Gerritszoon is a quote from a blog I found about this book[3].

This book is definitely an escapist, Mexican beach, summer read.  This is especially true if you work in SillyCon Valley.

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[1] Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, object-oriented, general-purpose programming language. It was designed and developed in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto in Japan. According to its authors, Ruby was influenced by Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp.

 

[2] “Griffo Gerrtiszoon is almost certainly a merger of Francesco Griffo (the designer of typefaces at the Aldine Press) and Gerrit Gerritszoon (aka Erasmus, who worked for the Aldine Press as a Greek scholar).  There is one typeface inspired by Francesco Griffo that has long been included on the Mac: Hermann Zapf's Palatino.  Interestingly Zapf considered Palatino a display typeface and designed a book weight complement called...wait for it...Aldus :-)  So I guess one could argue Zapf's Aldus is really Gerritszoon and Palatino is Gerritszoon Display.  But I think Palatino is most likely the typeface Sloan intended Gerritszoon to represent.”

 

[3] Thought Streams: a micro-blog for every idea

James Tauber

1429 thoughts; 125 streams
last posted April 11, 2015, 11:54 p.m.