A guarantee of quality, large sales and exponential print runs, literary prizes are a highlight of the back-to-school season for the book industry and printers. But this year the Covid is turning the calendar upside down. Due to the closure of bookstores during the lockdown, several Prizes, including the Goncourt and Renaudot, announced their decision to wait until the bookstores reopened to announce their winners. It should be noted that the Goncourt alone brings in an average of 380?000 sales per prize-winning book.
In spite of this "?embargo?", two awards were given. The Femina was won on 2 November by the writer Serge Joncour for his book entitled Human Nature (Flammarion). And it is the printer Firmin-Didot in Mesnil-sur-l'Estrée in the Eure, one of the three French printing works of the CPI group, which is in charge of printing the book. The week of the results, the new director of Firmin-Didot Mickaël Martins explained to the paper The Republican Echo have made 20?000 copies of the book in two days on the Cameron press.
The same breath of fresh air for the Floch printing works in Mayenne (Laballery group) which has the honourable task of printing the Prix Médicis 2020 awarded on November 6th to the writer Chloé Delaume for The Synthetic Heart published by Le Seuil. At the beginning of September, Floch's production director Bernie Louveau explained to France Bleu Mayenne that the deconfinement had enabled the printer to start up again at a sustained pace over June and August, generally calm months. Let's hope that the same phenomenon will occur after this second confinement and that the long-awaited reopening of bookshops can give a new lease of life to the literary season.
