Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

“Mr. P, good to meet you,” Neel says, extending a hand. “Love your store.” Penumbra gives it a solid shake. Kat waves hello.

“So these are your friends,” Penumbra says. “It is good to meet you, both of you.” He sits and exhales sharply. “I have not sat across from such young faces in this place since—well, since my own face was so young.”

I’m desperate to know what happened in the library.

“Where to begin?” he says. He wipes the dome of his head with one of the napkins. He’s frowning, agitated. “I told Corvina what has happened. I told him about the logbook, about your ingenuity.”

He’s calling it ingenuity; that’s a good sign. Our red-bearded waiter arrives bearing another mug of beer and sets it down in front of Penumbra, who waves a hand and says, “Charge this to the Festina Lente Company, Timothy. All of it.”

He’s in his element. He speaks again: “Corvina’s conservatism has deepened, though I barely thought such a thing was possible. He has done so much damage. I had no idea.” He shakes his head. “Corvina says California has infected me.” He spits it out: infected. “Ridiculous. I told him what you did, my boy—I told him what was possible. But he will not budge.”

Penumbra lifts his beer to his lips and takes a long sip. Then he looks from Kat to Neel to me, and he speaks again, slowly:

“My friends, I have a proposal for you. But you will need to understand something of this fellowship first. You have followed me to its home, but you do not know anything of its purpose—or have your computers told you that, too?”

Well, I know it involves libraries and novices and people getting bound and books getting burned, but none of it makes any sense. Kat and Neel only know what they’ve seen on my laptop screen: a sequence of lights making their way through the shelves of a strange bookstore. When you search for “unbroken spine,” Google replies: Did you mean: unicorn sprinkle? So the correct answer is: “No. Nothing.”

“Then we will do two things,” Penumbra says, nodding. “First, I will tell you just a little of our history. Then, to understand, you must see the Reading Room. There, my proposal will become clear, and I dearly hope you will accept it.”

Of course we’ll accept it. That’s what you do on a quest. You listen to the old wizard’s problem and then you promise to help him.

Penumbra steeples his fingers. “Do you know the name Aldus Manutius?”

Kat and Neel shake their heads, but I nod yes. Maybe art school was good for something after all: “Manutius was one of the first publishers,” I say, “right after Gutenberg. His books are still famous. They’re beautiful.” I’ve seen slides.

“Yes.” Penumbra nods. “It was the end of the fifteenth century. Aldus Manutius gathered scribes and scholars at his printing house in Venice, and there he manufactured the first editions of the classics. Sophocles, Aristotle, and Plato. Virgil, Horace, and Ovid.”

I chime in, “Yeah, he printed them using a brand-new typeface, made by a designer named Griffo Gerritszoon. It was awesome. Nobody had ever seen anything like it, and it’s still basically the most famous typeface ever. Every Mac comes preinstalled with Gerritszoon.” But not Gerritszoon Display. That, you have to steal.

Penumbra nods. “This much is well known to historians and, it appears”—he raises an eyebrow—“to bookstore clerks. It might also be of interest to know that Griffo Gerritszoon’s work is the wellspring of our fellowship’s wealth. Even today, when publishers buy that typeface, they buy it from us.” He goes sotto voce: “And we do not sell it cheap.”

I feel the sharp snap of connection: FLC Type Foundry is the Festina Lente Company. Penumbra’s cult runs on egregious licensing fees.

“But here is the crux of it,” he says. “Aldus Manutius was more than a publisher. He was a philosopher and a teacher. He was the first of us. He was the founder of the Unbroken Spine.”

Okay, they definitely did not teach that in my typography course.

“Manutius believed there were deep truths hidden in the writing of the ancients—among them, the answer to our greatest question.”

There’s a pregnant pause. I clear my throat. “What’s … our greatest question?”

Kat breathes: “How do you live forever?”

Penumbra turns and levels his gaze on her. His eyes are big and bright and he nods yes. “When Aldus Manutius died,” he says quietly, “his friends and students filled his tomb with books—copies of everything he had ever printed.”

The wind outside blows hard against the door and makes it rattle.

“They did this because the tomb was empty. When Aldus Manutius died, no body remained.”

So Penumbra’s cult has a messiah.

“He left behind a book he called CODEX VITAE—book of life. The book was encrypted, and Manutius gave the key to only one person: his great friend and partner, Griffo Gerritszoon.”