The Little Prince

Saint-Exupéry, finely bound by Zaehnsdorf

AuthorSAINT-EXUPÉRY, ANTOINE DEPrinter / PublisherHarcourt, Brace and CompanyPlace of PublicationNew YorkFormat4toBindingBound by Zaehnsdorf in very dark blue morocco, the covers with a gilt double fillet; spine with five raised bands flanked by gilt pearl rolls and ruled in gilt, lettered direct in the second and fourth compartments; all edges gilt; wide gilt dentelles worked with an anthemion-and-palmette roll, signed BOUND BY ZAEHNSDORF, LONDON in gilt at the foot of the front turn-in; gold-veined marbled endpapers in slate, cream and black. CollationA later printing of the first English edition, the copyright leaf retaining the Reynal & Hitchcock notice of 1943 and carrying the printing code K·7·56, indicating an impression of July 1956. 4to. 91, [3] pp. Colour frontispiece and the author’s watercolour and line illustrations throughout.Date[1956]ConditionA rich and exceptionally well finished binding, slight rubbing to front board, the gilt bright throughout, text block and illustrations clean and bright

Saint-Exupéry wrote and drew The Little Prince in exile, in New York and on Long Island, through the second half of 1942. It was published in New York in April 1943 in English and in French at once, while France was occupied and his own books were banned by Vichy — a French book that could not appear in France. He disappeared on a reconnaissance flight over the Mediterranean on 31 July 1944, and the book was not published in his own country until 1946, after the Liberation and after his death.

Katherine Woods’s translation is the one through which the book entered English and by which it was known for half a century; later versions have largely displaced it in print, and the Woods text now reads as a period document in its own right.

The impression can be placed within a narrow window. Harcourt, Brace absorbed Reynal & Hitchcock in 1948 and continued to issue the book without ever revising the 1943 copyright notice, so the imprint rather than the copyright dates the sheets; the firm became Harcourt, Brace & World in 1960. A title page reading Harcourt, Brace and Company therefore falls between those two dates, and the printing code narrows it to the summer of 1956.

Zaehnsdorf of London, founded in 1842 by the Hungarian-born Joseph Zaehnsdorf, was among the pre-eminent English trade binderies for well over a century; the firm was combined with Sangorski & Sutcliffe in 1988 and survives today under the Shepherds name.

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