Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

My friend Lisa highly recommended Robin Sloan's Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and I can now do the same. It's a book in that odd space between mainstream novel and science fiction. There's a clear quest, secrets to be decoded, heroes and villians, patrons and sinners, danger and love, secret cults and the internet. Our point of view character is a clerk in a bookstore that Is More Than It Seems. His roommate is a guy at Industrial Light and Magic who builds physical props not digital ones, and he begins dating a young woman who does data visualization at Google. He and his crew work to solve a puzzle left by Aldus Manutius, the brilliant Venetian printer and typesetter. Sloan recreates Aldus's type designer Francesco Griffo as the German Griffo Gerittszoon, with a very different backstory. There are nice puzzles for the reader, too: the secret society membership numbers appear in odd places so you can track folks through them. Aldus's printer's mark appears in an interesting context. And there's a boutique hotel in New York catering to computer nerds where the bar has a drink called the Blue Screen of Death. (I'm sure I missed some other little fillips.) It's a wonderful book, and I completely devoured it.