47 pages • 1 hour read
Robin Sloan, Rodrigo CorralMr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 25-28Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: The Tower
Chapter 25 Summary: Little Bits of Metal
Penumbra has vanished; Clay can’t find him anywhere, so he has taken to listening to The Dragon-Song Chronicles on audio-book in his living room, which is being taken over by Matropolis. Kat is throwing herself into the PM after the disappointment of the decoding project and seems to be ignoring Clay. Clay considers trying to decode Penumbra’s book to try to find him but decides against it. He feels responsible for everything that’s happened and doesn’t want to make things worse. While listening to the audio-book, Clay notices that there is a new line, one not present in the book. It is a reference to Aldrag the Wyrm-Father and Clay can think of only three people who might be able to figure out the reference: Penumbra, Corvina, and Edgar Deckle. He writes Deckle a letter asking for help and is slightly disappointed when Deckle emails an invitation to video-chat. Deckle reveals that, despite the fact that Manutius’s codex vitae had not been deciphered, but members of the Unbroken Spine were angry with Corvina that such digital methods had not been attempted before. Clay asks Deckle if he knows where Penumbra lives: he does, but he will only give Clay the address if he can find the original Gerritszoon punches that were stolen from the fellowship. Clay is stunned, but when Deckle tells him that he is resourceful, he realizes that he does “know people with special skills and… how to put their skills together” (242). To start searching for the lost Gerritszoon punches, Clay turns to Oliver Grone, Penumbra’s other clerk who is also an archaeologist and who now works at a bookstore called Pygmalion. Oliver tells him that is he is to be successful, he will “need a seat at the Accession Table” (244).
Chapter 26 Summary: First Grade
In order to allow Clay access to the Accession Table—“an enormous database that tracks all artifacts in all museums, everywhere” (246)—Oliver introduces him to his friend Tabitha Trudeau, who runs a small museum called the California Museum of Knitting Arts and Embroidery Sciences. Like all museums, Tabitha’s uses the Accession Table to track artifacts and help catch forgeries, and she allows Clay to use it in exchange for a donation from Neel’s Foundation for Women in the Arts. For Clay, the Accession Table terminals “constitute the secret knowledge of this particular cult” (247). At first, looking for the Gerritszoon punches is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Then, he creates a false entry for the punches, claiming that Tabitha’s museum has acquired them. Soon, an alarm sounds and the institution that is actually in possession of the punches—Consolidated Universal Long-Term Storage LLC.—calls to try and correct the error. Speaking to a friendly woman from Con-U, Clay feigns ignorance and subsequently arranges to borrow the Gerritszoon punches from Con-U, which is located in Nevada.
Chapter 27 Summary: The Storm
Clay travel to Con-U in Nevada to retrieve the Gerritszoon punches and is greeted by Cheryl, the woman he spoke to over the phone at Tabitha’s museum. Once there, he undergoes a rigorous security check and is made to wear “pink latex gloves” (254) and “a Tyvek jumpsuit with elastic at the wrists and built-in booties” (254. He is then allowed to enter “the most amazing space I have ever seen” (256). It is a room like an airplane hangar but “the shelves are all moving “(256). Cheryl has provided him with an iPad and a shelf number and now he must undertake the eerie task of moving through the remotely-controlled shelves in search of the punches. “In the very center of the facility, nothing moves” (258), making it easier to locate the right shelf. Finally, he finds them, stored in a cardboard box, and he feels “like Telemach Half-Blood with the Golden Horn of Griffo. I feel like the hero” (259).
Chapter 28 Summary: The Dragon-Song Chronicles, Volume III
Returning to Cheryl’s office to fill out the paperwork allowing him to borrow the punches, Clay asks her who owns them, and she tells him that nobody does anymore: “we’re like an orphanage for a lot of things” (261). He leaves with the punches on a three-month loan that can be extended for up to a year and begins the drive back to San Francisco. On the way, he continues to listen to Clark Moffat’s audio-books; he is now on volume three of The Dragon-Song Chronicles, which, he has learned, was also Moffat’s codex vitae. With this in mind, he recognizes Penumbra in the description of a friendly blue ghost and realizes that the floors of the Wyrm Queen’s tower “are a metaphor for the code-breaking techniques of the Unbroken Spine” (264). Listening to the book’s finale, Clay has a revelation and, possibly, a new theory. When he gets home in the middle of the night, he wakes Mat up to ask for a magnifying glass and uses it to carefully examine the Gerritszoon punches. The chapter ends with an enigmatic line from Moffat’s book: “The mountains are a message from Aldrag the Wyrm-Father”, but Clay doesn’t immediately reveal what that message is.
Chapter 25 – Chapter 28 Analysis
These chapters reiterate Sloan’s point about fantasy novels having layers of meaning that require careful attention. The fact that Moffat’s books help Clay to discover a clue to the mystery suggests that popular fiction is equally deserving of “deep reading” as the codex vitae are. When Clay notices a discrepancy between the paper and the audio versions of volume three of The Dragon-Song Chronicles, he understands that he will need help in deciphering the reference to Aldrag the Wyrm-Father. Clay’s awareness of his need for other people is actually one of his greatest strengths, as he realizes when Deckle calls him resourceful. Resources are usually thought about in financial terms, but this limited view of what constitutes a resource is challenged in the novel. Clay’s ability to form good relationships and to work with other people allows him to achieve more than he could working alone.
Continuing his practice of drawing on other people’s expertise, Clay finds himself in the world of museums, both big and small, when Oliver Grone tells him about the Accession Table. Clay concludes that the Table is another form of secret knowledge and that the museum curator community is just another kind of cult. While his desire for information to be openly and freely available is admirable, Clay’s experience with the Unbroken Spine seems to have soured his opinion of any kind of specialist knowledge whatsoever; classifying museums and the people who work in them as a type of cult seems to misrecognize expertise for exclusion. In fact, the need for knowledge to be broken into organizational units is suggested by Clay’s visit to the Con-U storage facility, where the vast number of artifacts that lie forgotten and unclaimed is testament to the sheer volume of information that exists and poses the problem of how to manage and keep track of it.
