Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

Back at NewBagel, when I designed menus and posters and (may I remind you) an award-winning logo, I learned all about the digital font marketplace. Nowhere else is the bucks-to-bytes ratio so severe. Here’s what I mean: An e-book costs about ten dollars, right? And it’s usually about a megabyte’s worth of text. (For the record, you download more data than that every time you look at Facebook.) With an e-book, you can see what you paid for: the words, the paragraphs, the possibly boring expositions of digital marketplaces. Well, it turns out a digital font is also about a megabyte, but a digital font costs not tens of dollars but hundreds, sometimes thousands, and it’s abstract, basically invisible—a thin envelope of math describing tiny letterforms. The whole arrangement offends most people’s consumer instincts.

So of course people try to pirate fonts. I am not one of those people. I took a typography course in school and for our final project, everyone had to design their own typeface. I had grand aspirations for mine—it was called Telemach—but there were just too many letters to draw. I couldn’t finish it in time. It ended up capitals-only, suitable for shouty posters and stone tablets. So trust me, I know how much sweat goes into those shapes. Typographers are designers; designers are my people; I am committed to supporting them. But now FontShop.com tells me that Gerritszoon Display, distributed by FLC Type Foundry of New York City, costs $3,989.

So of course I will try to pirate this font.

A connection zigzags through my brain. I close the tab for FontShop and go instead to Grumble’s library. It’s not only pirated e-books here. There are fonts, too—illegal letters of every shape and size. I page through the listings: Metro and Gotham and Soho, all free for the taking. Myriad and Minion and Mrs Eaves. And there, too, is Gerritszoon Display.

I feel a pang of remorse as I download it, but really just a tiny pang. FLC Type Foundry is probably somehow a subsidiary of Time Warner. Gerritszoon is an old font, its eponymous creator long dead. What does he care how his typeface is used, and by whom?

Mat sets the word above a carefully traced outline of the bookstore’s symbol—two hands, open like a book—and with that, we have our design. The next day at ILM, he carves the whole thing out of scrap metal using a plasma cutter—in Mat’s world, a plasma cutter is as customary as a pair of scissors—and finally we press it into the false-weathered leather with a fat C-clamp. It sits silently embossing on the kitchen table for three days and three nights, and when Mat releases the clamp, the cover is perfect.

*   *   *

So finally, it is time. Night falls. I take Oliver Grone’s place at the front desk and begin my shift. Tonight I will claim my ticket to adventure in Kat’s world. Tonight I will make the switch.

But it turns out I would make a terrible spy—I can’t seem to calm myself down. I’ve tried everything: reading long works of investigative journalism; playing the computer version of Rockets & Warlocks; pacing the Waybacklist. I can’t stay focused on anything for more than three minutes.

Now I’ve resigned myself to sitting at the front desk, but I can’t stop squirming. If fidgets were Wikipedia edits, I would have completely revamped the entry on guilt by now, and translated it into five new languages.

Finally, it’s quarter to six. The thinnest tendrils of dawn are creeping in from the east. People in New York are softly starting to tweet. I’m completely exhausted because I’ve spent the whole night vibrating.

The real logbook VII is stuffed into my messenger bag but way too big for it, so it bulges out and looks, to my eye, like the most ludicrously incriminating thing in the world. It’s like when one of those huge African snakes swallows an animal whole and you can see it wiggling around in there, all the way down.

The fake logbook is standing with its stepsiblings. When I slid it into place, I realized it left a telltale streak in the dust on the shelf’s edge. First I panicked. Then I ventured deep into the Waybacklist, scooped dust off the shelves there, and sprinkled it in front of the fake logbook until the depth and grade of the dust matched perfectly.

I have a dozen explanations (with branching subplots) if Penumbra spots the difference. But I have to admit: the fake logbook looks great. My touch-up dust is ILM-caliber. It looks real and I don’t think I’d give it a second glance and, whoa, the bell tinkles over the front door—

“Good morning,” Penumbra says. “How was the night?”

“Fine good great,” I say. Too fast. Slow down. Remember: the shadow of normalcy. Crouch there.

“You know,” Penumbra says, peeling off his peacoat, “I have been thinking. We should retire this fellow”—he taps the Mac Plus on the head with two fingers, a gentle thwack thwack—“and acquire something more up-to-date. Nothing too expensive. Perhaps you can recommend a make and model?”