Shopkeeper
Rampant

Tres­passers!

Today, I’m launching a new line of business: Penumbra Print Shop, a man­u­fac­turer of sta­tionery with inter­esting capabilities.

Why sta­tionery? Because I find myself com­pelled by print prod­ucts that are not just “for one thing”, but open to many sur­prising uses. Because sta­tionery can be so clever, so beautiful. Because last year I read The Note­book by Roland Allen, and it blew my mind!

Why with inter­esting capabilities? Because it’s me. Because there’s already so much sta­tionery out there — clever and beautiful — and because I believe I can see a path towards a phys­ical-dig­ital syn­thesis that is provoca­tive and useful.

I’m Robin Sloan, a fiction writer with wide-ranging interests, which I capture here in my newsletter. This is an archived edition, originally transmitted in April 2026. You can sign up to receive future editions using the form at the bottom of the page.

This newsletter has a few parts, all connected:

• Magic Post­card: our first offering

• Uh-oh, books changed my life again: how I became rad­i­cal­ized

• Taking the note: syn­thesis and good luck

Magic Postcard

Our first offering is Magic Post­card, which allows you, the sender, to attach a little piece of media — photo or video — that your recip­ient can view imme­di­ately upon delivery.

The front looks like this — 

—while the back looks like this:

Scan the code, the video plays. There’s no app, no login, no subscription … this is really just a post­card! You buy it, you use it: just like a post­card. The expe­ri­ence is fast and light: just like a post­card.

Of course, it’s trivial to transmit a photo or video to the phone of someone you love … but, turns out, it is VERY FUN to send it to their mailbox instead. I’ve had a crew of friends trying this out, and they con­firm that the extra effort — the dis­tance traveled — brings a new (old) sparkle to this interaction.

Magic Post­card also makes a fine gift note. Record your greeting and explanation — “So, I know it LOOKS like there’s a living swarm of bees in this box … and in fact, there is, BUT … ”—and slip it in along­side the gift.

These post­cards are designed and printed by me, right here in my office. I also wrote the soft­ware that makes them work, and I should add a word about that:

Magic Post­card is end-to-end encrypted, which means the media you attach is acces­sible ONLY by the bearer of the post­card. Penumbra Print Shop can’t see it, and, poetically, if the post­card is destroyed or discarded, the media is effec­tively deleted. This is a nerdy detail — possibly overkill — but it seems to me very important; it brings the logic of the real phys­ical post­card into dig­ital space, insisting, this is how things ought to work.

Magic Post­card is avail­able now, a pack of three inau­gural designs:

https://www.penumbraprint.com/shop/

These ship anywhere/everywhere in the world. We’ll pack and dis­patch your orders on Monday, April 27.

Uh-oh, books changed my life again

I’ve had long­time sub­scribers remark that they often “feel things coming in advance”: rec­om­men­da­tions and reflec­tions in this space grow into new projects, whole novels. Of course, this is never planned; it just so hap­pens that thought becomes action. But, I like the idea that a Sloan-centric pre­dic­tion market could totally foresee my next moves, simply by reading closely … 

Last year, I rec­om­mended these three books, all related:

• The Book-Makers, by Adam Smyth
• The Book, by Keith Houston
• The Notebook, by Roland Allen

Their cumu­la­tive effect on me was inspiring and refocusing. If I hadn’t read them, I would not now be pur­suing this new line of business. The ripple of influ­ence went from wow, inter­esting, to what if … ?, to hmm, I appear to be foil-stamping thou­sands of post­cards.

Books really can change your life, if you are open to it!

Listen, I acknowl­edge it’s no sur­prise that the author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Book­store is ener­gized by print … yet the mag­ni­tude of that energy is new. Maybe it’s overdue. Certainly, I have become a better printer than I ever was before. There’s the difference: the past year has been not theory but practice.

That reading list was not just inspiring, but radicalizing. What do I mean by that? I mean that reflecting on the pro­found offer­ings of the book in all its forms, including the blank note­book, helped me under­stand more clearly the dis­ap­point­ment of the dig­ital.

I don’t think that dis­ap­point­ment needs to be total, or permanent. My rad­i­cal­iza­tion isn’t “anti-technology”. How could it be, when the book — when paper itself — is a daz­zling technology, still under active development? I see reme­dies for the mess we’re in, civilizationally, if we can find ways to port the healthy, humane prop­er­ties of print into dig­ital space.

What are those prop­er­ties? Well, just for example, I believe the note­book pro­vides a basi­cally com­pre­hen­sive model for infor­ma­tion technology:

• Easy to manufacture anywhere on Earth
• Available in many configurations, from cheap to luxe
• Never runs out of power
• Never surprises you with an OS update
• Totally flexible interface: becomes whatever you imagine
• Totally private … yet never locks you out for lack of a password
• Can be shared when needed: as easy as tearing out a page
• Durable and reliable
• Data is sensibly partitioned: loss of a notebook is annoying, not life-ruining
• Compostable 😌

I know some of those sound a bit silly, even glib, but I think they’re all very serious, even the last one. I have pur­chased and trashed enough e-readers!! I don’t want any more plastic confections. I don’t want any more accounts.

My note­book doesn’t require an account. Nei­ther do the novels on my shelves. Log­ging in is easy: pick it up.

There’s a whole R&D agenda here. For each prop­erty above, we can ask, how might the dig­ital work more like this? Maybe it can’t ever reach the ideal of the paper note­book, but surely we can push that asymptote.

Penumbra Print Shop has an array of prod­ucts planned. Magic Post­card is the first, and although it’s simple, it car­ries this whole agenda spring-loaded inside.

Taking the note

The last thing I’ll share is more personal. It’s about dis­covery and syn­thesis and good luck.

Over at Fat Gold, we’ve now oper­ated our own olive mill for three seasons. The first was a wallop: phys­ical stress and real­time education, long days of heavy lifting and orbiting the machines. Walking in circles. The sur­prise was that I liked it; or, really, that my body liked it. Responded well. My legs felt good, and my stomach felt good, and my brain felt good, and at the end of each day I col­lapsed and slept soundly.

After that first season, I resolved to “take the note” and find more of this embodied work in other seasons. Printing seemed, at first, too obvious … turns out, it was exactly the right amount of obvious. I loved last year’s zine project: not just the writing but the printing, the folding, the mailing. And of course I was totally encour­aged by your enthu­si­astic response.

I should pause there. The number of people reading this newsletter is, in the grand scheme of the modern internet, very modest … but, time and time again, you have eagerly sup­ported some new project — some invention. I wouldn’t dare try these things if I didn’t know you were out there: Tres­passers on the Dragon Moon, Society of the Double Dagger, Com­mittee to Find and Rescue Annabel Scheme … fellow travelers. Great patrons.

Anyway, I feel lucky to have had this illu­mi­nating expe­ri­ence, and I feel smart to have, like, noticed. Taken it seriously. Now, I’ve acquired addi­tional Means of Pro­duc­tion and built a little man­u­fac­turing node. The Murray Street Media Lab has really grown into the name; I’ll show you some of my new gear in a future edition.

There was and is no master plan. I did not foresee, three years ago, that the oper­a­tion of an olive mill would send me so much deeper into print. (I did not realize there was that much deeper to go!) I def­i­nitely did not foresee this interest in sta­tionery. But, over the years, I have felt such deep sat­is­fac­tion seeing Fat Gold fit into people’s lives, sup­port their health and enjoyment … and the ques­tion arose, could I print things that sup­port your plans and desires, not just mine?

It doesn’t all have to be Robin’s dreams beamed into your brain.

Although: there are more of those coming, too.

Magic Post­card is offered with stamps included, so these won’t linger in a drawer like so many post­cards do. Order a set, record a few videos for people you love, and send them back out imme­di­ately, with the knowl­edge that you and your recip­ients are among the first few hun­dred people on Earth to try some­thing new.

From the print shop,

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter in mid-May.

April 2026