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2020/2021 1 Foreword When I started this piece in early March, the number of confirmed Coronavirus infections worldwide had just passed 100,000. Today, as some museums in the UK re-open, the number of confirmed cases worldwide is nearly 11 million, with over half a million deaths across 188 countries. Early March seems like a distant world, with countless lives now ended prematurely, and many families, households, and businesses facing an uncertain future. Phrases like “the new normal”, “socially-distanced”, “Zooming”, “online learning”, “shielding” and “household bubbling” have all now entered our lingua franca. We’ve also learned more about the effects of this terrible disease, how it seems to affect certain communities and age groups more than others, and how it may have existed undetected for many weeks, even months, before the first recorded cases emerged in January. This much still seems certain: the number of reported infections will rise, and it’s likely that all of us will have to keep on changing the way we live: in travel, work, shopping, education and business. The publishing world has seen the shuttering of bookstores, a decline in books sales, short-notice movements in production from the Far East to Europe and back again, and the cancellation of the Bologna, London and Paris book fairs. While Frankfurt Book Fair is officially set to happen in October, it’s unclear how many of us will physically visit it. But we can, and must, build some collective head-space away from Head Office and General Enquiries the seeming unstoppable narrative of anxiety-inducing events, and look D Giles Limited 66 High Street forward to a better place, where difficult truths are confronted, discussed Lewes and debated, and resolved.
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