Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. Ajax Penumbra 1969
14.99 €
In stock
Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. Ajax Penumbra 1969
14.99 €
Secret societies and the quest for immortality, ancient books, ancient print shops, underground reading rooms, dusty warehouses of lost artifacts and shiny Google data stores, tooth-crushing ciphers, data visualization, a real quest, real friendship, promising love and, strangely enough, dragons. All of this fell on web designer Clay Jannon because he lost his job and wandered aimlessly around San Francisco and inadvertently wandered into a 24-hour (and, incidentally, vertical) bookstore. And immediately got a job there as a salesman, who doesn't sell anything - only gives out mysterious volumes of unreadable gibberish to obviously obsessed people in exchange for other equally unreadable volumes. In the middle of the night. Of course Clay will try to figure out what's going on at Mr. Penumbra's store. Surely it will turn out that there lies a centuries-old mystery, an ancient unsolved cipher. And that cipher, along with Clay, will be cracked by coders and librarians, archaeologists and designers, hackers and museum curators, special effects creators and rock climbers. "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore" has been on The New York Times and National Public Radio bestseller lists, was named book of the year by the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and NPR immediately upon publication, and subsequently published in thirty-plus countries. This book is a tribute to Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Haruki Murakami, Dan Brown, and early Umberto Eco, but mostly to the futurological theories of Robin Sloan, who easily reconciles the adherents of the paper-book world with the inhabitants of the intangible digital universe because he simply sees no contradiction between them. The analog world and the digital world are wonderful, kind, and full of mystery. We were born to solve them - if possible, together with everyone we love. The novel Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookshop and its prequel, the novella Ajax Penumbra 1969, are published in a new translation and for the first time under one cover.
See also:
- All books by the publisher
- All books by the author
- All books in the series The Big Novel