The Little Prince
By Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
 
First UK edition, first impression: William Heinemann, 1944. Translated from the French by Katherine Woods.

Original light orange cloth, the upper board with the little prince borne aloft by a flight of birds, drawn by the author, in red and blue, the title in red; the spine lettered in red. Original pictorial dust jacket from the author's own design, unclipped and priced 9s. 6d. net. Illustrated throughout in colour and monochrome by the author.

A very good copy, the boards beautifully clean and fresh, save for some trivial traces of rubbing to the bottom edge and spine ends; the contents clean and free from names and inscriptions, with the odd occasional spot or faint mark to the initial leaves and a couple of creases to the top edge of page 11.

The jacket good and unclipped. Several tears with associated tape repairs, the longest to the front flap hinge and upper panel, with some loss to the spine ends and corners and minor associated creasing; the flaps slightly and a little crudely trimmed. The design - the prince alone on his asteroid beneath the stars - remains clear across both panels, the yellow stars and the black lettering unfaded.

Written during Saint-Exupéry's exile in North America after the fall of France, and first published in New York by Reynal & Hitchcock in April 1943; this is the first edition published in Britain. Saint-Exupéry, flying reconnaissance with the Free French from Corsica, took off on the morning of 31 July 1944 and did not return; the wreckage of his Lightning was recovered from the sea off Marseille and identified in 2004. The book reached France only after the Liberation. It has since been translated into some five to six hundred languages and dialects - by that measure the second most translated work ever published, after the Bible - and has sold an estimated 140 million copies.