A specialist London bookstore is selling an original typescript of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s children’s classic The Little Prince, complete with the author’s hand-written corrections and revisions.
The battered book and Saint-Exupery’s passport, issued by the French culture ministry, will go on sale at the Abu Dhabi Art 2024 fair which opens on November 20, with an expected price of at least $1.25 million.
It was acquired earlier this year for an undisclosed sum by rare books specialist store Peter Harrington.
The typescript also contains numerous drawings by the author as well as his famous phrase “One only sees clearly with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes”.
Sammy Jay, of Peter Harrington Rare Books, said it was one of three known versions of the transcript, one of which is held by the National Library of France (BNF).
“Unlike the other two which were given to people, he kept this one and it was his own working copy of the typescript so that’s what makes it extra special,” Jay said.
In addition to the handwritten corrections, the version due to be sold includes passages that were later edited out.
Such a book is extremely unusual in the rare books market, where sky-high prices are not the norm.
“You don’t usually get something of this status,” Jay said, citing the example of the scroll typescript for Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road, which sold for $2.4 million in 2001.
“The market for rare and ancient books is very different from any other market in the sense that you don’t often sell for millions,” he said.
The Little Prince remains one of the world’s best-selling books having sold more than the first Harry Potter and The Hobbit combined, according to Jay.
The typescript, he said, had generated a lot of interest and was expected to be snapped up by a museum or private collection, possibly in Asia or the Arab world.
Saint-Exupery wrote his tale about an alien prince and his interstellar travels while in exile in the United States in 1942, having fled France after the Nazi invasion.
The pilot-explorer left the United States in 1943 to fight on the north African front and the book was published the same year in the United States only.
Saint-Exupery disappeared during a flying mission over the Mediterranean in July 1944, and never saw his book’s worldwide success.
