Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

The tension between tradition and technology is central to the action in Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. Traditional forms of knowledge are represented most obviously by the mysterious fellowship, the Unbroken Spine, who have dedicated themselves to deciphering the encrypted manuscript of a fifteenth-century Venetian printer, Aldus Manutius, in order to discover the secret to immortality. At the other end of the scale, contemporary technological approaches to information are represented by Google, whose offices house a high-tech book scanner that can transform the printed page into units of digital data. It becomes the task of Clay to mediate between these two different approaches as he helps his employer, Mr. Penumbra, to try and use advanced technology to decode Manutius’s book. Interestingly, Kat, a Google employee, is similarly interested in immortality and reveals the existence of a project called Google Forever, which works on “life extension” (163). In this respect, the two camps have more in common than it first appears. Furthermore, the fact that the Unbroken Spine was founded by Manutius who was, in his own time, at the forefront of technical innovation, undercuts the fellowship’s rejection of technology.

The novel, then, is interested in disrupting the supposed distinction between tradition and technology and uses books to do so.