September 2020, and Royal Mail have decided to hike – by a considerable amount – the cost of sending parcels by airmail. They’ve also re-jigged the geography of the world, into the bargain. The USA, which was in World Zone 1, now finds itself in an entirely new category (World Zone 3) which is substantially more expensive than anywhere else.
Whether this is some kind of organisational protest about the antics of the tangerine buffoon who currently scuttles around the White House, we’ve no idea, but it beggars belief that it costs more to send a parcel to the US (dozens of flights daily, just the other side of the Atlantic) than, say, some remote village at the southernmost tip of Chile, or a far-flung island of Indonesia.
Our standard international postage outside Europe has always been surface mail, which takes at least seven weeks to crawl across the globe. Folk who bought our books in the US used to be able to add £3.00 for airmail delivery. Sadly, we can no longer do this. The good news is that digital editions of all our books are available, and while they don’t – in our opinion – have the same quality as a physical book, that may well be the only affordable option from now on. We can only apologise, but it’s out of our hands.
P.S. All existing orders will be honoured at the paid-for rate. Of course.