Le Petit prince

The manuscript of Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince), held at the Pierpont Morgan Library, will cross the Atlantic for the first time next year: it will be exhibited at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs as part of its exhibition À la rencontre du Petit Prince, held from February 17 to June 26, 2022, in its wing of the Palais du Louvre.

The copy is in perfect condition, in its original boards and its correct dust jacket, at the “386 Fourth Avenue” address.

The jacket is the genuine jacket for this copy, with the copy number recorded on the spine.

The copy otherwise conforms in every respect to the characteristics of the first edition: the limitation leaf inserted between the first endleaf and the half-title, the list of the author’s works, the correct publisher’s address, the mistake in the crow in the drawing of the mountains on p. 63, and the correct copyright; not to mention the original dust jacket. As with all numbered copies, the $2 price has been clipped.

Following the publication, on February 20, 1942, of Pilote de guerre (Flight to Arras), Americans were deeply moved by Saint-Exupéry’s account: the book topped the bestseller lists in the United States for six months. In France, it was published at the end of the year, in only 2,100 copies, but the Vichy authorities banned it.

Because Saint-Exupéry often sketched a small character, his American publisher Curtice Hitchcock suggested he write a tale for children. Saint-Exupéry decided to illustrate the story himself and set to work at once. He bought paper, colored pencils and watercolors, and withdrew with his wife Consuelo to the Bevin House manor in New Jersey. Shut away in his library, he worked in fits and starts, mostly at night. Tired and depressed according to those close to him, the writing of Le Petit Prince became a personal ordeal, a melancholy literary journey to the border between his childhood and his adult life. The manuscript has never left the United States since: Saint-Exupéry had entrusted it to a friend, Silvia Hamilton, before leaving to fight from North Africa in the spring of 1943. She later sold it to the Morgan Library in 1968.

Le Petit Prince was published in New York on April 6, 1943, first in French, then in English, by Reynal & Hitchcock.
The numbered printing comprised 260 copies for the French version and 525 for the English translation.

Several thousand copies of this first printing, along with a wrappered version, appeared simultaneously. A long series of later printings followed, with numerous variants in the dust jacket, the pages and the colors of the publisher’s boards.

Saint-Exupéry had little opportunity to enjoy the book’s reception, since he left the United States on April 20 for Algiers, where he underwent training at Laghouat before joining Group 2/33 at Oujda in Morocco. He was promoted to major in June and flew his first mission on July 21 out of La Marsa in Tunisia. He never returned to the United States, still less to literary affairs: on July 31, 1944, on a final reconnaissance mission, his plane crashed into the Mediterranean.

The dust jacket is in very fine condition, nearly new, not yellowed and without loss.
Two small tears should be noted, along with a crack at the spine.

Exceptional condition.