Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

My dismay must be all over my face, because Deckle immediately holds up his hands and says: “Nope, I’m going to trade you. I broke every rule in the book—and it’s a very old book—and I gave you the key to the Reading Room when you needed it, right? Now I want you to do something for me. In exchange, I will happily tell you where to find our friend Mr. Ajax Penumbra.”

This kind of calculation is not what I expected from friendly, smiling Edgar Deckle.

“Do you remember the Gerritszoon type I showed you down in the print shop?”

“Yeah, of course.” Down in the subterranean copy shop. “Not much left.”

“Right. I think I told you this: the originals were stolen. It was a hundred years ago, just after we arrived in America. The Unbroken Spine went berserk. Hired a crew of detectives, paid off the police, caught the thief.”

“Who was it?”

“One of us—one of the bound. His name was Glencoe, and his book had been burned.”

“Why?”

“They caught him having sex in the library,” Deckle says matter-of-factly. Then he raises a finger and says, sotto voce, “Which, by the way, is still frowned upon, but would not get you burned today.”

So the Unbroken Spine does make progress—slowly.

“Anyway, he swiped a stack of codex vitae and some silver forks and spoons—we had a fancy dining room back then. And he scooped up the Gerritszoon punches. Some say it was revenge, but I think it was more like desperation. Latin fluency doesn’t get you far in New York City.”

“You said they caught him.”

“Yep. He couldn’t find anyone to buy the books, so we got those back. The spoons were long gone. And the Gerritszoon punches—they were gone, too. They’ve been lost ever since.”

“Weird story. So?”

“I want you to find them.”

Um: “Seriously?”

Deckle smiles. “Yes, seriously. I know they might be at the bottom of a dump somewhere. But it’s also possible”—his eyes glint—“that they’re hiding in plain sight.”

Little bits of metal, lost a hundred years ago. It would probably be easier to go looking for Penumbra door-to-door.

“I think you can do this,” Deckle says. “You seem very resourceful.”

One more time: “Seriously?”

“Drop me a line when you find them. Festina lente.” He smiles and the feed cuts to black.

Okay, now I’m angry. I’d expected Deckle to help me. Instead, he’s giving me homework. Impossible homework.

But: You seem very resourceful. That’s something I haven’t heard before. I think about the word. Resourceful: full of resources. When I think of resources, I think of Neel. But maybe Deckle is right. Everything I’ve done so far, I’ve done by calling in favors. I do know people with special skills, and I know how to put their skills together.

And come to think of it, I have just the resource for this.

*   *   *

To find something old and obscure, something strange and significant, I turn to Oliver Grone.

When Penumbra disappeared and the store shut down, Oliver leapt so nimbly to a new job that I suspected he’d had it in his back pocket for a while. The job is at Pygmalion, one of the true-believer indies, a no-bullshit bookstore set up by Free Speech Movement alumni on Engels Street over in Berkeley. So now Oliver and I are sitting together in Pygmalion’s cramped café, tucked behind the sprawling FOOD POLITICS section. Oliver’s legs are too big for the tiny table, so he’s stretching them out to one side. I’m nibbling a scone made with raspberries and bean sprouts.

Oliver seems happy working here. Pygmalion is huge, almost a whole city block stacked with books, and it is supremely well organized. Bright blocks of color on the ceiling mark out the sections and matching stripes run in tight patterns across the floor like a rainbow circuit board. When I arrived, Oliver was carrying an armload of heavy tomes toward the ANTHROPOLOGY shelves. Maybe his big build isn’t a linebacker’s after all; maybe it’s a librarian’s.

“So what’s a punch?” Oliver says. His knowledge of obscure objects doesn’t run quite so deep after you get past the twelfth century, but I am undeterred.

I explain that the system of movable type relies on tiny metal characters that can be slotted into rows that stack up to make pages. For hundreds of years, the characters were made individually, each one cast by hand. To cast the characters, you needed an original model, carved from hard metal. That model was called a punch, and there was a punch for each letter.

Oliver is quiet for a moment, and his eyes have a distant look. Then he says, “So. I should tell you. There are really two kinds of objects in the world. This is going to sound sort of spacey, but … some things have an aura. Others don’t.”

Well, I’m banking on aura. “We’re talking about one of the key assets of a centuries-old cult here.”