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    Ajax Penumbra: 1969
    Ajax Penumbra: 1969
    Ajax Penumbra: 1969
    Ebook82 pages1 hour

    Ajax Penumbra: 1969

    By Robin Sloan

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    The utterly charming prequel to the New York Times-bestseller Mr Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore.

    San Francisco, 1969. The summer of drugs, music and a new age dawning. A young, earnest Ajax Penumbra has been given his first assignment as a Junior Acquisitions Officer - to find the single surviving copy of the Techne Tycheon, a mysterious volume that has brought and lost great fortune for anyone who has owned it. After a few weeks of rigorous hunting, Penumbra feels no closer to his goal than when he started. But late one night, after another day of dispiriting dead ends, he stumbles upon a 24-hour bookstore and the possibilities before him expand exponentially. With the help of his friend's homemade computer, an ancient map, a sunken ship and the vast shelves of the 24-hour bookstore, Ajax Penumbra might just find what he's seeking...
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAtlantic Books
    Release dateOct 24, 2013
    ISBN9781782394464
    Author

    Robin Sloan

    Robin Sloan grew up in Michigan and now splits his time between San Francisco Bay Are and the San Joaquin Valley of California. He is the author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough.

    Read more from Robin Sloan

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    Reviews for Ajax Penumbra

    4/5

    223 ratings18 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Interesting introduction to Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, you meet Corvina before he turns evil, he even smiles, and you learn about the previous owner of the bookstore. It really is a treasure hunters bibliophile story.
    • 4/5
      Mostly it makes me want to read the book again - I've forgotten a good deal of that story, though I know the bookstore and a ship play a part. It's interesting seeing a young Penumbra, figuring out how things are going to go. Plus the state of the art in computers at the time... Other than that, pretty standard Sloan - San Francisco magic realism. Fun.
    • 3/5
      A bit cutesy, and all the tension of the usual prequel novella, but not a bit of pain to it, and the re-use of the abandoned ships in SF is delightful.
    • 4/5
      I wish there was so much more to this book...!
    • 4/5
      This was a cute little adventure and some backstory into Ajax Penumbra. In this we learn of Penumbra's origins, how he came to be in San Francisco, became a member of a secret book society, and came to own the 24-hour books store. It was an enjoyable short story.
    • 4/5
      Ajax Penumbra betritt den Laden, den er später selbst einmal führen soll. Doch noch ahnt er nichts vom Bund des Ungebrochenen Buchrückens.
      Seine Universität hat einen Auftrag für ihn. Ein lang verschollenes Buch soll er finden und so begibt er sich auf die mühselige Reise, die ihn schließlich zu einem kleinen unscheinbaren Buchladen führt.
      Ohne etwas vom großen Geheimnis zu ahnen, findet Penumbra dort schnell Verbündete für sein Unterfangen.

      DIE UNGLAUBLICHE ENTDECKUNG DES MR. PENUMBRA beschreibt die Anfänge des Ajax Penumbras. Wir erfahren ein wenig von seiner Vergangenheit, seiner Familie und seinen Werdegang, der an der einen oder anderen Stelle dem von Clay gar nicht so unähnlich ist.
      Wir treffen auf alte Bekannte und sagenbehaftete Charaktere aus DIE SONDERBARE BUCHHANDLUNG DES MR. PENUMBRA.
      Eine kurze und knappe Geschichte für zwischendurch, die ein durchaus gelungenes Prequel zum eigentlichen Hauptroman darstellt.

      Man lernt Ajax Penumbra noch besser kennen und schließt ihn immer mehr in sein Herz und auch der Kurztext an sich ist eine schöne Erweiterung. Allein die Suche nach einem verschwundenen Buch und wie alles irgendwie begann ist eine tolle Idee des Autors.
    • 4/5
      What a fun read and a closer look at Ajax Penumbra after reading Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Book Store. Loved getting a closer looks at the characters in Mr Penumbra's seeing who they were.

      Received my copy at the Texas Book Festival after purchasing Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Book Store.
    • 3/5
      Summary:
      From Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, the story of Mr. Penumbra’s first trip to San Francisco—and of how he got entangled with the city’s most unusual always-open enterprise… It is August 1969. The Summer of Love is a fading memory. The streets of San Francisco pulse to the sounds of Led Zeppelin and Marvin Gaye. And of jackhammers: A futuristic pyramid of a skyscraper is rising a few blocks from City Lights bookstore and an unprecedented subway tunnel is being built under the bay.

      Meanwhile, south of the city, orchards are quickly giving way to a brand-new industry built on silicon. But young Ajax Penumbra has not arrived in San Francisco looking for free love or a glimpse of the technological future. He is seeking a book—the single surviving copy of the Techne Tycheon , a mysterious volume that has brought and lost great fortune for anyone who has owned it. The last record of the book locates it in the San Francisco of more than a century earlier, and on that scant bit of evidence, Penumbra’s university has dispatched him west to acquire it for their library. After a few weeks of rigorous hunting, Penumbra feels no closer to his goal than when he started. But late one night, after another day of dispiriting dead ends, he stumbles across a 24-hour bookstore, and the possibilities before him expand exponentially . . .

      My take: 3 looks
      Another fun book about books from Robin Sloan. My F2F book club is reading "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore", which I read a year ago. Since I had already read the book, I thought I would pick this one up, a prequel.

      This tells the story of Ajax Penumbra and how he comes to San Francisco and to the store that would eventually become his own. A fun read, and recommended...but read the other first.
    • 4/5
      An endearing glance at Mr Penumbra's younger years as a Junior Acquisitions Clerk for the Galvanic Library. The suggestion that there's more than one bunch of mad book collectors in the world is delightful, and the sly comments of Langston Armitage had me in fits.
    • 4/5
      This prequel short to Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore flew under my radar until just a couple of months ago. I squirreled it away once I found it, and my recent flights made this the perfect antidote to flight fatigue for a brief hour or so.

      I suspect the magic of this little short would be lost on anyone who hasn't yet read ...24-hour Bookstore - If I hadn't known in detail what the purpose of the Bookstore is, I don't know that I would have enjoyed learning about Ajax's first experience with it quite so much. The "mystery" about the location of the missing book, however, I found really entertaining.

      All in all a very nice compliment and backstory to the full length novel.
    • 2/5
      How disappointing! I thought that 'Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookshop' was one of the great, serendipitous discoveries of the year, and I was very keen to read this prequel. Unfortunately it fell woefully short of the calibre of the earlier book. Very feeble all round - there was such potential for a very engaging story, but Sloan just passed it up.
    • 4/5
      Short but fun.
    • 5/5
      Having grown up in SF in the mid sixties, this was great reading.
      A few notes I want to share.
      Francis and George who were perusing the Cinema section...George Lucas and Francis Ford?
      Claude...the inventor of the internet?
      Anyone else find cool references?
    • 4/5
      I completely and unexpectedly enjoyed the heck out of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. So when I saw that there was a short prequel introducing the mysterious and appealing Ajax Penumbra's back story, I could hardly help myself. Robin Sloan's Ajax Penumbra 1969 is a tasty little morsel of a short story for anyone who thrilled to the tale in the longer book and wants a chance to return to the odd, narrow, and tall bookstore in San Francisco.


      The short prequel tells how Ajax Penumbra ends up at the bookstore that will come to bear his name and of his introduction to the mysterious society behind the store. A young Penumbra, working for the college he recently attended, is searching for a rare book, now lost, that was last known to be in San Francisco more than a century ago. He is doing this at the behest of a professor of Occult Lit, a secret series of classes he stumbled into because he very intentionally signed up for a class on sentence diagramming. But once in the course, he finds the work fascinating and continues plumbing the mysteries in it until after graduation he lands the job in the school's library that sends him on his literary quest to San Francisco.


      In California, he meets several people who will figure prominently in Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and the reader has a chance to see what his relationships with everyone were from the beginning. Penumbra also maintains a connection with his old roommate at tiny Galvanic College, Claude Novak, a science fiction fanatic and computer programmer in the nascent computer industry in Silicon Valley. With the help of his new friends and his old friend Claude, he will dig into history helped by cutting edge technology and his journey into the mysteries of the 24-hour bookshop will commence.


      Definitely written for those who have already enjoyed the longer novel, this is a fun addition to the world Sloan has created. It is interesting to see how Mr. Penumbra got his start in San Francisco and what drove him as a young man. As a tale, it is enigmatic enough that it probably doesn't stand up too well without prior knowledge of the novel but as an additional treat to tack onto the magic of the novel, it is worth a read.
    • 5/5
      After reading the novel "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore" and coming out to Amazon to write a review, I discovered Robin Sloan had written this e-prequel, and for only $2.99 I could read a short story about Penumbra and his first encounter with our favorite bookstore.

      It was well worth it.

      Yes, Yes, I know, I've read the other reviews, and no, this isn't quite the deep mystery that the novel was, and no, this doesn't offer any additional character development of Penumbra other than a little personal background, but this is still a fun story that relates how he discovered the store and how he met people in the novel. Don't have high literary hopes; just read this for fun.

      Some could be right -- this very well may be left over stuff from the novel, that stuff that some authors have to cut for the overall flow of the novel; it happens all the time. Or it could be that Sloan had a little bit more he wanted to tell because he enjoyed this world so much that he wanted to make one last visit.

      I don't care either way -- it was fun, it was worth the time and the money. If you enjoyed the novel, then splurge, it'll make you smile.
    • 4/5
      A short prequel to Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. I felt about this one basically the same way that I felt about the longer work: a bit boilerplate, but great fun at the same time. The account of the bookstore prior to Penumbra taking up ownership is a worthwhile complement to the novel, too.
    • 5/5
      This is a fun little short story that goes along with Mr. Penumbra's 24 hour Bookstore. It tells the story of how Ajax Penumbra originally became involved with the bookstore and the background on his relationship with some of the older characters in the larger organization. In this story, Mr. Penumbra has been sent to find a lot and valuable book, that was last known to exist in San Francisco in the 1800's. In his effort to find the book, he works as a clerk for the bookstore. Though only a very short story (Kindle Single), it was fun to revisit the characters and get a little insight into the background of Mr. Penumbra. I only hope that another book will be forthcoming as it was a treat to visit the bookstore, even for such a short visit.
    • 5/5
      An excellent prequel to 24 hour bookstore. Hope theres more to come!

    Book preview

    Ajax Penumbra - Robin Sloan

    Ajax Penumbra 1969

    Ajax Penumbra 1969

    Robin Sloan

    First published in the United States of America in 2013 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.

    Published in Great Britain in 2013 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

    Copyright © Robin Sloan, 2013

    The moral right of Robin Sloan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

    This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

    A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

    EBook ISBN: 978 1 78239 446 4

    Printed in Great Britain

    Atlantic Books

    An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

    Ormond House

    26–27 Boswell Street

    London

    WC1N 3JZ

    www.atlantic-books.co.uk

    Contents

    Cover

    Half Title

    Title Page

    Copyright

    A 24-Hour Bookstore

    Ajax Penumbra!

    Friedrich & Fang

    Psychohistorian

    The Gift

    Members Only

    The Sandhog Cometh

    The Wreck of the William Gray

    A Million Random Digits

    Climbers

    Appendix

    ‘An extract from Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore’

    The Society of the Unbroken Spine

    A Note About the Author

    A 24-Hour Bookstore

    A visitor walks the city, searching. He has a list: libraries and bookstores, museums and archives. He descends into the bowels of the San Francisco Chronicle, follows a sullen clerk to the morgue’s oldest files. There, the newsprint is brittle to the touch. He handles it carefully but confidently, his fingers trained for the task, but the Chronicle is too young. He does not find the name he is looking for.

    The visitor canvasses Chinatown, learns to say Bookstore? in Cantonese: Shu diàn? He braves the haze of Haight Street, speaks to a long-haired man selling books on a blanket in Golden Gate Park. He crosses the bay to Cody’s and Cal, ventures south to Kepler’s and Stanford. He inquires at City Lights, but the man behind the register, whose name is Shig, shakes his head. Never heard of him, man. Never heard of him. He sells the visitor a copy of Howl instead.

    It is 1969, and San Francisco is under construction. The great central artery of Market Street is a trench. South of there, whole blocks have been knocked down and scraped clean; a fence is festooned with signs that proclaim it the YERBA BUENA GARDENS, though there is not a single plant or tree in evidence. To the north, the visitor passes a construction site where a wide ziggurat reaches for the sky and a placard promises THE FUTURE SITE OF THE TRANSAMERICA PYRAMID above a fine-lined rendering of a shining spear.

    The visitor walks the city, disappointed. There is no place left to go; his list is folded and finished. He hikes to the Golden Gate Bridge, because he knows his parents will ask him about it. A quarter of the way across, he turns back. He expected a view of the city, but the bay is filled with fog, and his short-sleeved shirt is flapping in the frigid wind.

    The visitor walks back to his hotel, going slowly, wallowing in his failure. In the morning, he will buy a train ticket home. He walks along the water for a while, then cuts into the city. He follows the border between North Beach and Chinatown, and there, wedged between an Italian restaurant and a Chinese pharmacy, he finds a bookstore.

    Inside the restaurant, the chairs are all turned up on red-checked tablecloths. The pharmacy stands shadowed, doors drawn tight with dark loops of chain. The whole street is sleeping; it is nearly midnight. The bookstore, though, is wide awake.

    He hears it before he sees it: the murmur of conversation, the tinny swirl of a song. The sound swells as the bookstore’s door swings open and bodies tumble out into the street. The bodies are young, trailing long hair and loose fabric. The visitor hears the flick of a lighter, sees a leaping spark. The bodies pass something around, sighing and exhaling long plumes that merge with the fog. The visitor hangs back, watching. They pass the something around again, then fling it out into the street and go back inside.

    He draws closer. The front of the store is all windows, top to bottom, square panes set into a grid of iron, entirely fogged over. Inside, it looks like a party in progress. He sees faces and hands, dark mops of hair, all made Impressionistic by the foggy glass. The song is one he has heard elsewhere in the city; something popular.

    He pushes the door and a wave of yeasty warmth washes over him. Somewhere above, a bell tinkles brightly, announcing him, but no one notices. He cannot get the door entirely open; it bumps up against someone’s back, someone’s loose jacket covered with a constellation of patches. The visitor squeezes in sideways, muttering a quiet apology, but the jacket-wearer doesn’t notice; he is engrossed in conversation with a woman clutching a portable radio, the

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