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The first book published by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
One of 806 copies: one of seventeen hors commerce copies, lettered a to q, on vélin pur fil Lafuma-Navarre (copy b).
Signed presentation inscription: “Pour monsieur Jean Schlumberger. En hommage respectueux. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.”
First edition.
The first book published by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
One of 806 copies: one of seventeen hors commerce copies, lettered a to q, on vélin pur fil Lafuma-Navarre (copy b).
Signed presentation inscription: “Pour monsieur Jean Schlumberger. En hommage respectueux. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.”
It was around 1925 that Saint-Exupéry met, in the Paris salon of his cousin Yvonne de Lestrange, the leading figures of Éditions Gallimard: Gaston Gallimard, André Gide and Jean Schlumberger. These encounters would play a decisive role in his entry into literature.
Before undertaking his adventure with Aéropostale in South America, Saint-Exupéry was sent to the naval aviation school at Brest for advanced training. It was there that the first proofs of his book arrived, passages of which he read to his cousin Honoré d’Estienne d’Orves, who became his devoted first reader. The book was published thanks to André Gide, with a preface by André Beucler, who was the first to argue that “Saint-Exupéry is not a writer” — an idea later taken up and developed by André Malraux: Saint-Exupéry was no armchair writer, and “he will write nothing that his life does not guarantee, or that he has not had occasion to verify at his own cost. This is why the purely literary universe remains suspect to him, insofar as it deceives the reader by transporting him into an easy and deceptive world. Saint-Exupéry remains one of those men bound to exactitude, for whom imagination may supplement reality, but never replace it.”
A fine copy with a distinguished provenance.
Provenance: library of Jacques Bredèche (bookplate); Librairie Camille Sourget (catalogue 3, 2008, no. 54); Michel Demont (bookplate).