Author: SAINT-EXUPERY, ANTOINE DE
Title: The Little Prince
Description: NY: Harcourt, Brace and Company, c. 1953. First American Edition. First Printing. Hard Cover. Illustrated by Antoine De Saint-Exupery. First Harcourt, Brace and Company edition ($3.95 price on dust jacket). Publisher's full light brown cloth, gilt (brown) lettering on spine and cover. Illustrated with 40 watercolors by the author. Translated from the French by Katherine Woods. The dust jacket, now in Mylar, is only slightly worn, somewhat faded and has a couple of very small closed tears. FINE/NEAR FINE. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry first published The Little Prince in 1943, only a year before his Lockheed P-38 vanished over the Mediterranean during a reconnaissance mission. More than a half century later, this fable of love and loneliness has lost none of its power. The narrator is a downed pilot in the Sahara Desert, frantically trying to repair his wrecked plane. His efforts are interrupted one day by the apparition of a little, well, prince, who asks him to draw a sheep. "In the face of an overpowering mystery, you don't dare disobey," the narrator recalls. "Absurd as it seemed, a thousand miles from all inhabited regions and in danger of death, I took a scrap of paper and a pen out of my pocket." And so begins their dialogue, which stretches the narrator's imagination in all sorts of surprising, childlike directions. The Little Prince describes his journey from planet to planet, each tiny world populated by a single adult. It's a wonderfully inventive sequence, which evokes not only the great fairy tales but also such monuments of postmodern whimsy as Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. And despite his tone of gentle bemusement, Saint-Exupéry pulls off some fine satiric touches, too. There's the king, for example, who commands the Little Prince to function as a one-man (or one-boy) judiciary: "I have good reason to believe that there is an old rat living somewhere on my planet. I hear him at night. You could judge that old rat. From time to time you will condemn him to death. That way his life will depend on your justice. But you'll pardon him each time for economy's sake. There's only one rat." The author pokes similar fun at a businessman, a geographer, and a lamplighter, all of whom signify some futile aspect of adult existence. Yet his tale is ultimately a tender one - a heartfelt exposition of sadness and solitude, which never turns into Peter Pan-style treacle. "Trying to be witty," we're told at one point, "leads to lying, more or less." But Saint-Exupéry's drawings offer a handy rebuttal: they're fresh, funny, and like the book itself, rigorously truthful. - James Marcus. The volume is in excellent condition, unmarked, unread, tight, square, and clean. The dust jacket is only slightly worn, somewhat sunned along the fore-edge and has a couple of very small closed tears at the heel of the spine. FINE/VERY GOOD.. Color drawings. Small 4to 9" - 11" tall. 91, (2) pp. Fine in Near Fine dust jacket .
Keywords: Fiction; Literature; Children's Books Illustrated Books
Title: The Little Prince
Description: NY: Harcourt, Brace and Company, c. 1953. First American Edition. First Printing. Hard Cover. Illustrated by Antoine De Saint-Exupery. First Harcourt, Brace and Company edition ($3.95 price on dust jacket). Publisher's full light brown cloth, gilt (brown) lettering on spine and cover. Illustrated with 40 watercolors by the author. Translated from the French by Katherine Woods. The dust jacket, now in Mylar, is only slightly worn, somewhat faded and has a couple of very small closed tears. FINE/NEAR FINE. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry first published The Little Prince in 1943, only a year before his Lockheed P-38 vanished over the Mediterranean during a reconnaissance mission. More than a half century later, this fable of love and loneliness has lost none of its power. The narrator is a downed pilot in the Sahara Desert, frantically trying to repair his wrecked plane. His efforts are interrupted one day by the apparition of a little, well, prince, who asks him to draw a sheep. "In the face of an overpowering mystery, you don't dare disobey," the narrator recalls. "Absurd as it seemed, a thousand miles from all inhabited regions and in danger of death, I took a scrap of paper and a pen out of my pocket." And so begins their dialogue, which stretches the narrator's imagination in all sorts of surprising, childlike directions. The Little Prince describes his journey from planet to planet, each tiny world populated by a single adult. It's a wonderfully inventive sequence, which evokes not only the great fairy tales but also such monuments of postmodern whimsy as Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. And despite his tone of gentle bemusement, Saint-Exupéry pulls off some fine satiric touches, too. There's the king, for example, who commands the Little Prince to function as a one-man (or one-boy) judiciary: "I have good reason to believe that there is an old rat living somewhere on my planet. I hear him at night. You could judge that old rat. From time to time you will condemn him to death. That way his life will depend on your justice. But you'll pardon him each time for economy's sake. There's only one rat." The author pokes similar fun at a businessman, a geographer, and a lamplighter, all of whom signify some futile aspect of adult existence. Yet his tale is ultimately a tender one - a heartfelt exposition of sadness and solitude, which never turns into Peter Pan-style treacle. "Trying to be witty," we're told at one point, "leads to lying, more or less." But Saint-Exupéry's drawings offer a handy rebuttal: they're fresh, funny, and like the book itself, rigorously truthful. - James Marcus. The volume is in excellent condition, unmarked, unread, tight, square, and clean. The dust jacket is only slightly worn, somewhat sunned along the fore-edge and has a couple of very small closed tears at the heel of the spine. FINE/VERY GOOD.. Color drawings. Small 4to 9" - 11" tall. 91, (2) pp. Fine in Near Fine dust jacket .
Keywords: Fiction; Literature; Children's Books Illustrated Books
Price: US$ 200.00 Seller: Round Table Books, LLC
- Book number: 29934
- Book number: 29934