This is a lovely little book for a very specific kind of reader. I never properly owned a Mac pre-Intel, but always admired them from afar. This fictionalised account of real-world New Mork Mac repair shop TekServe is written with real affection. It reminded me of Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs in that it’s about an eclectic bunch of nerds, but without quite so much archness and irony and a lot more details on printer repair.

A brief note on typesetting: It’s laid out with ragged paragraphs, each with space above and below. This gives each one an individuality and gave me the impression that it had been precisely crafted. Pages often had only a couple of paragraphs on them and sections rarely carry overleaf. I’m guessing that this goes beyond just typesetting and perhaps was how the author wrote the text. It feels very much like a collection of pages. I can imagine a folder on the author’s desktop containing 001.doc, 002.doc and so on.

Some sections of the book are written from the point of view of printer components - laser, fuser, paper feeder, etc - which I didn’t think worked as well as the human characters, but whatever. I liked it. It hasn’t been published in the UK as far as I can tell, but copies are available on eBay and Amazon (use eBay).