Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore Reading Response

            Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan is a book about a young man named Clay Jannon.  He starts working at a bookstore only to discover a secret society called the Unbroken Spine.  The society is bent on cracking a code about the secret to living forever that was left in a book by an old book printer.  Clay teams up with his friends to crack the code using technology, technology which the secret society refuses to use, and to save Mr. Penumbra and his bookstore which the society wants to close.  In this book Robin Sloan uses themes of Old Knowledge such as what is in books vs. New Knowledge such as the internet and how they interact.

            Robin Sloan uses themes of Old Knowledge such as the knowledge contained in books or knowledge which is passed down through word of mouth throughout his story.  In the book clay is talking to Rosemary Lapin, a very old lady who is a novice in the Unbroken Spine about a code which leads to a connect the dots picture of the founder of the society.  As he looks at her work drawn out on an old scroll, he observes, “But it is incomplete; in fact, it’s barely started.  You can see the curve of the chin and the hook of the nose, but nothing else… How long, I wonder, has Lapin been working on this?”  This is meant to show readers, that working by hand without use of tech takes a very long time much longer than if you used a computer to do the work for you.  All of this is meant to show readers that even though books and your brain are very good, sometimes you need technology to speed things along. 

            In the book, Robin Sloan uses themes of New Knowledge such as information found using technology or the internet throughout the book.  At one point in the book, Clay is talking to Mr. Penumbra about the connect-the-dots code set up by the Unbroken Spine which he solved.  He says, “ ‘I borrowed an old log book, and we scanned it…because Google has this machine, it’s super fast…Anyways, the point is, we just pulled out the data automatically.’ ” As previously seen this code has taken Rosemary Lapin several years, and she had barely started it.  While on the other hand, it had taken Clay only a day to start and complete it with the help of technology.  This is all to show readers that New Knowledge is very helpful and it is not something to be taken lightly.  It may very well lead to some great discoveries. 

            All in all the message that Robin Sloan want to send his readers is that while books and ancient codes may all be well and good, it is technology and the internet that will help us in the end, or in other words, “move over Old Knowledge, here comes New Knowledge”.  The age of pens and papers is ending and the age of the internet and all its wonders is beginning.  And while it may be hard to let go, we all need to accept it.