War & Peace

Louise Shanks Maude was born in Moscow to an English family and Aylmer Maude spent more than twenty years there in business before the two settled in England; both knew Tolstoy, both visited Yasnaya Polyana, and Aylmer became his friend, his collaborator in the practical work of the last years, and his authorised biographer, publishing the Life in 1908–10. Their versions were made with Tolstoy's sanction and under his eye, and were gathered into the Oxford Centenary Edition of 1928–37. The Maude War and Peaceheld the field in English for the better part of a century and is still defended by readers who prefer it to everything since; its virtue is a plain, unhurried English that declines to improve on Tolstoy, and it is the text through which most English readers before the 1960s met the novel.

Asprey of Bond Street sold bindings; for most of its history it did not make them. Asprey bought Sangorski & Sutcliffe from Stanley Bray, George Sutcliffe’s nephew, in the late 1970s — the date is given variously as 1978 and 1985 — and acquired Zaehnsdorf about a decade later, running both as SSZ Ltd from a single Bermondsey workshop until Shepherds bought the combined business out of Asprey in 1998 and revived the individual names. A binding carrying both marks places itself within the two decades when the two names belonged to one company.

The 1942 date carries a period charm of its own. Macmillan reissued the Maude War and Peace in the year of Stalingrad, when Britain’s new Russian alliance made Tolstoy’s Napoleonic invasion the most legible novel in the language, and it sold accordingly.