Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

I’ve told my friends about Penumbra’s, and a few of them have stopped in to ogle the shelves and watch me climb into the dusty heights. I’ll usually cajole them into buying something: a Steinbeck novel, some Borges stories, a thick Tolkien tome—all of those authors evidently of interest to Penumbra, because he stocks the complete works of each. At the minimum, I’ll send my friends packing with a postcard. There’s a pile of them on the front desk. They show the front of the store in pen and ink—a fine-lined design so old and uncool that it’s become cool again—and Penumbra sells them for a dollar each.

But a buck every few hours doesn’t pay my salary. I can’t figure out what does pay my salary. I can’t figure out what keeps this bookstore in business at all.

There’s a customer I’ve seen twice now, a woman who I am fairly certain works next door at Booty’s. I am fairly certain about this because both times her eyes were ringed raccoon-like with mascara and she smelled like smoke. She has a bright smile and dusty blond-brown hair. I can’t tell how old she is—she could be a tough twenty-three or a remarkable thirty-one—and I don’t know her name, but I do know she likes biographies.

On her first visit, she browsed the front shelves in a slow circle, scuffing her feet and doing absentminded stretches, then came up to the front desk. “D’you have the one about Steve Jobs?” she asked. She was wearing a puffy North Face jacket over a pink tank top and jeans, and her voice had a little twang in it.

I frowned and said, “Probably not. But let’s check.”

Penumbra has a database that runs on a decrepit beige Mac Plus. I pecked its creator’s name into the keyboard and the Mac made a low chime—the sound of success. She was in luck.

We tilted our heads to scan the BIOGRAPHY section and there it was: a single copy, shiny like new. Maybe it had been a Christmas present to a tech-executive dad who didn’t actually read books. Or maybe Tech Dad wanted to read it on his Kindle instead. In any case, somebody sold it here, and it passed Penumbra’s muster. Miraculous.

“He was so handsome,” North Face said, holding the book at arm’s length. Steve Jobs peered out of the white cover, hand on his chin, wearing round glasses that looked a bit like Penumbra’s.

A week later, she came hopping through the front door, grinning and silently clapping her hands—it made her seem more twenty-three than thirty-one—and said, “Oh, it was just great! Now listen”—here she got serious—“he wrote another one, about Einstein.” She held out her phone, which showed an Amazon product page for Walter Isaacson’s biography of Einstein. “I saw it on the internet but I thought maybe I could buy it here?”

Let’s be clear: This was incredible. This was a bookseller’s dream. This was a stripper standing athwart history, yelling, Stop!—and then we discovered, heads tilted hopefully, that Penumbra’s BIOGRAPHY section did not contain Einstein: His Life and Universe. There were five different books about Richard Feynman, but nothing at all about Albert Einstein. Thus spoke Penumbra.

“Really?” North Face pouted. “Shoot. Well, I guess I’ll buy it online. Thanks.” She wandered back out into the night, and so far she hasn’t returned.

Let me be candid. If I had to rank book-acquisition experiences in order of comfort, ease, and satisfaction, the list would go like this:

1. The perfect independent bookstore, like Pygmalion in Berkeley.

2. A big, bright Barnes & Noble. I know they’re corporate, but let’s face it—those stores are nice. Especially the ones with big couches.

3. The book aisle at Walmart. (It’s next to the potting soil.)

4. The lending library aboard the U.S.S. West Virginia, a nuclear submarine deep beneath the surface of the Pacific.

5. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.

So I set myself to righting the ship. No, I do not know anything about bookstore management. No, I do not have my finger on the pulse of the post-strip-club shopping crowd. No, I have never really righted any ships, unless you count the time I saved the Rhode Island School of Design fencing club from bankruptcy by organizing a twenty-four-hour Errol Flynn movie marathon. But I do know there are things that Penumbra is obviously doing wrong—things he isn’t doing at all.

Like marketing.

I have a plan: First I’ll prove myself with some small successes, then ask for a budget to place some print ads, put a few signs in the window, maybe even go big with a banner on the bus shelter just up the street: WAITING FOR YOUR BUS? COME WAIT WITH US! Then I’ll keep the bus schedule open on my laptop so I can give customers a five-minute warning when the next one is coming. It will be brilliant.