Ajax Penumbra

APPENDIX

Books on display in Al-Asmari’s 24-Hour Bookstore in September 1969, on the low table labeled MO’S PICKS:
The High King, Lloyd Alexander
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
Naked Came the Stranger, Penelope Ashe
The Edible Woman, Margaret Atwood
The Drowned World, J. G. Ballard

In Watermelon Sugar, Richard Brautigan
Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
The Secret Meaning of Things, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Fantastic Four #89, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer
Behold the Man, Michael Moorcock
Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth
City of the Chasch, Jack Vance
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe

plucks a book out of the trunk and presents it to you. The cover shows a pale, swirling galaxy. It is Isaac Asimov’s Foundation; Claude has spoken of this one often.

tains more one-of-a-kind, untranslatable, and/or inexplicable volumes than any other collection on earth. In the second session, he sends you down into the stacks. There are books made from silver and bone. There are books with blood on their pages, figuratively and literally. There are books made of feathers; books cloaked in jade; books that ring like bells when you pull them off the shelf; books that glow in the dark.

Armitage explains that Galvanic’s library con‍