Collection: War and Peace

Despite the coming of autumn and all its pleasures, and with our team of specialists busying away in our new shop in Cecil Court, it is not easy to ignore the looming spectre of war, an appetite for which appears only to be growing among the leaders of the world. From the quiet of our Athenaeum, it is shocking to witness the extent of the suffering that human beings are willing to inflict on one another.

In preparing this catalogue it has been noticeably easier to find books on the subject of war than on peace. We have brought together books from both sides of the divide with a fabulous first edition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace separating the two. In times of peace, there is a perverse fascination with the miseries of international violence – with the distance of time, it can appear a theatre for heroism, ingenuity and tragedy. But the reality of war entails little romance, and it is only as we witness its horrors with ever-closer proximity that we seem to develop a passion for its absence.

Hopefully we will see the resurgence of a peace movement in the months and years ahead. Perhaps it has started already and we just can’t hear it yet, its voices drowned out by the belligerent chants of the current wielders of power.

While it is easy to become despondent, and to question the importance of the quiet and arguably self-indulgent pleasure of reading books, we believe that living peacefully ourselves is, in its humble way, its own protest against the violence of our time. By maintaining some semblance of peace in our own lives, by developing our understanding and capacity for empathy in the manner that reading books is so good for, then we can know that the world still has some goodness left in it, some reason worth ending a war for. In its way, reading is also a kind of resistance.

Gordon Brough, Chairman