Putting 2020 Behind Us

What a momentous year we’ve all been through. A global pandemic. A reckoning over racial injustice. More devastating evidence of climate change. The impeachment of a failed president. The election of a heartening new one.

The year has been exhausting, nerve-wracking, grief-filled, and isolating. But not all has been gloom and doom. The past 12 months also have generated inspiring examples of resilience, invention, caring, and giving. Today, there’s much cause for hope amid signs of medical solutions and political renovation.

Here at P&P, we’re eager to move beyond the challenges of 2020, which proved the most trying year in the store’s history. After the pandemic hit, our doors had to close to foot traffic through the spring and early summer. Helping avert total collapse of the business, our customers rallied behind us, placing online orders in record numbers, then venturing back into the stores when they reopened.

Along the way, P&P’s staff members were heroic, devising new strategies to meet strict public health requirements, fulfill online orders, operate remotely from home, arrange for curbside pickups, and move P&P’s extensive array of author talks entirely into the virtual world. As iffy as our future has felt at times during the ordeal, here we are still, buoyed by the outpouring of support many of you have shown, most recently over the holiday shopping season. (And special thanks to those who’ve watched us on P&P’s ever-growing YouTube channel.)

We look forward to 2021 and its promise of health, sanity, competence, and a revived spirit of kindness and decency. Whether the old normal returns or a new normal is established, we at least now have a fresh perspective on some things that really count in a crisis—on keeping focused, being adaptable, staying in touch with family and friends, and deepening the bonds of community. And one thing you can remain assured of: P&P’s unshaken commitment to go on serving you through books, ideas, and conversation.

— Brad and Lissa