Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

Lately, even the Waybacklist borrowers seem to be missing. Have they been seduced by some other book club on the other side of town? Have they all bought Kindles?

I have one, and I use it most nights. I always imagine the books staring and whispering, Traitor!—but come on, I have a lot of free first chapters to get through. My Kindle is a hand-me-down from my dad, one of the original models, a slanted, asymmetrical plate with a tiny gray screen and a bed of angled keys. It looks like a prop from 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are newer Kindles with bigger screens and subtler industrial design, but this one is like Penumbra’s postcards: so uncool it’s cool again.

Halfway through the first chapter of Cannery Row, the screen flashes black, freezes, then fades. This happens most nights. The Kindle’s battery is supposed to last, like, two months, but I left mine out on the beach too long and now it only goes for about an hour unplugged.

So I switch to my MacBook and make my rounds: news sites, blogs, tweets. I scroll back to find the conversations that happened without me during the day. When every single piece of media you consume is time-shifted, does that mean it’s actually you that’s time-shifted?

Finally, I click over to my new favorite: Grumble.

Grumble is a person, probably a human male, a secretive programmer who operates at the intersection of literature and code—part Hacker News, part Paris Review. Mat emailed me a link after he visited the store, guessing that Grumble’s work might resonate here. He was correct.

Grumble manages a bustling pirate library. He writes complicated code to break the DRM on e-books; he builds complicated machines to copy the words out of real books. If he worked for Amazon, he’d probably be rich. But instead he cracked the supposedly uncrackable Harry Potter series and posted all seven e-books on his site, free to download—with a few changes. Now, if you want to read Potter without paying, you suffer fleeting references to a young wizard named Grumblegrits who studies at Hogwarts alongside Harry. It’s not so bad; Grumblegrits gets a few good lines.

But it’s Grumble’s newest project that has me mesmerized. It’s a map of the locations of every science fiction story published in the twentieth century. He’s plucked them out with code and plotted them in 3-D space, so year by year you see humankind’s collective imagination reaching farther: to the moon, to Mars, Jupiter, Pluto, to Alpha Centauri and beyond. You can zoom and rotate the whole universe, and you can also jump into a little polygonal spaceship and cruise around in the cockpit. You can rendezvous with Rama or find the Foundation worlds.

So, two things:

1. Neel is going to love this.

2. I want to be like Grumble. I mean, what if I could make something this cool? That would be a real skill. I could join a startup. I could go work at Apple. I could see and interact with other human beings under the warm glow of the daystar.

Lucky for me, Grumble has, in customary hacker-hero fashion, released the code that powers the map. It’s a whole 3-D graphics engine written in a programming language called Ruby—the same one we used to run the website at NewBagel—and it’s completely free.

So now I’m going to use Grumble’s code to make something of my own. Looking around, I realize my project is standing right in front of me: I’ll learn 3-D graphics by making a model of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. I mean, it’s a tall, skinny box full of smaller boxes—how hard can that be?

To begin, I had to copy the database from Penumbra’s old Mac Plus onto my laptop, which was actually not a trivial task, since the Mac Plus uses plastic floppy disks and there’s no way to get one of those into a MacBook. I had to buy an old USB floppy drive on eBay. It cost three dollars, plus five for shipping, and it felt strange to plug it into my laptop.

But now, with the data in hand, I’m building my model of the store. It’s crude—just a bunch of gray blocks slotted together like virtual LEGOs—but it’s starting to look familiar. The space is appropriately shoe-boxy and all the shelves are there. I’ve set them up with a coordinate system, so my program can find aisle 3, shelf 13 all by itself. Simulated light from the simulated windows casts sharp-edged shadows through the simulated store. If this sounds impressive to you, you’re over thirty.

It’s taken three nights of trial and error, but now I’m stringing out long lines of code, learning as I go. It feels good to be making something: a fairly persuasive polygonal approximation of Penumbra’s store is spinning slowly on my screen, and I’m happier than I’ve been since the fall of NewBagel. I’ve got the new album from a peppy local band called Moon Suicide piping through my laptop speakers, and I’m just about to load the database into—