I just finished reading Robin Sloan’s novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, which I bought at the store that inspired it, City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, California. It’s a famous store, founded by poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953, and Sloan’s book made a splash when it came out in 2021—not least because of its glow-in-the-dark cover.
The book begins with some of the charming quirks of independent bookstores, from impossibly tall shelves to impossibly odd customers. But it quickly becomes something else: a century-spanning library-based conspiracy novel that’s like National Treasure if Nicolas Cage had been obsessed with Helvetica. Leaving the bookstore behind, we spend time in Google’s flashy headquarters, a secret underground reading room, and a bizarrely automated museum storage facility. At the end, the main character’s artsy, athletic friends turn the store into a climbing gym.
It’s a fun story, but I wish the book had dwelt a little longer in the place it began: a weird store with weird books, weird hours, and weird neighbors. With that in mind, here are the things that I think any great bookstore mystery novel should include. When I see each of these in a real bookstore, I could be convinced there’s a conspiracy afoot.
Lay reshelvers
I’ve never been employed in a bookstore, but I’ll admit to having moved a few Gabriel García Márquez novels from the M’s to the G’s. What I haven’t done (but have seen evidence of others doing) is move Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species from Science to Fiction. And I can imagine endless other, more meaningful permutations: a cookbook reshelved in Paranormal, perhaps, or a Bible in Local Authors. All illicit reconfigurations of the bookstore’s geography, like a half-erased treasure map.
Staff favorites
At a coffee shop, you might know your barista’s name; in an Uber, you learn your driver’s license plate number and reputation; at a family restaurant, you might get to meet the chef’s kids. But nothing feels as revealing of an employee’s interiority as those shelves of favorite or recommended books, curated by people named Liz (Sally Rooney, Amanda Gorman) and Myles (Slaughterhouse-Five, Lincoln in the Bardo) and Astrid (Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, somehow The Tempest). How better to leave a coded message to your coworkers or favorite customers?
Publisher’s overstock discounts
Why does every bookstore in the world have thirty-seven twelve-dollar hardcovers of Jonathan Franzen’s Purity or Umberto Eco’s Numero Zero or that Salman Rushdie book with too many words in its title? Who ordered too many, and why? Sure, there’s probably an official economic answer—supply and demand and hype and oversaturation—but that’s just what they want you to think.
In-store ordering
I admire the people who look for a new book in their local bookstore and, if they don’t find it, place an order with the store that will be fulfilled in three to six business months. Infinitely easier just to order online or to find something else to read. But bookstore orders require commitment to both the book and the store—the kind of loyalty that a secret society might demand.
Crappy editions of public-domain classics
No longer can you only get The Great Gatsby Charles Scribner & Sons for $16 with that iconic blue face on its cover. Now you can read about new-money woes on a no-money budget: you just have to put up with blurry type, bizarre pagination, and a cover design straight from the free edition of Canva. And who’s to say the text hasn’t changed a bit too?
My tenth-anniversary copy of Mr. Penumbra includes a foreword by Paul Yamazaki, a longtime bookseller at City Light Books. Yamazaki praises Sloan for capturing the “magic” of bookselling: the way that individual purchases and recommendations can open up whole worlds of discovery and community. This is definitely right: reading can feel (in good and bad ways) like joining a cult, and Sloan makes that feeling literal. But bookstores have a smaller-scale magic too, and I’d love to read a bookstore mystery that doesn’t hide these everyday enchantments so quickly behind the spectacular. Any recommendations?
Josh Parks graduated from Calvin in 2018 with majors in English and music, and he is currently a PhD student in religious studies at the University of Virginia. When not writing, he can be found learning the alto recorder, watching obscure Disney movies, and making excruciating puns.
