1943 "Le Petit Prince" Signed First Edition
GUEST: I brought my copy of Le Petit Prince. I found this about 40 years ago in a thrift shop in Kansas City.
APPRAISER: Mm-hmm.
GUEST: And I have four or five copies. And I thought, well, this would be a nice addition. I have one in Italian, I have one in German.
APPRAISER: (chuckles)
GUEST: I have several in English. This is maybe my only one in French. I'm a French teacher, and I lived in France for three years. I guess I'm a Francophile at heart, I don't know.
APPRAISER: Do you remember what you paid for it?
GUEST: I did-- I paid five quarters. I handed $1.25 over.
APPRAISER: So, you said you'd like to show us some of your favorite illustrations.
GUEST: Yeah, it's beautiful.
APPRAISER: And tell us about this one.
GUEST: This is where Little Prince is looking very princely. So he's in his garb
and describing who he is. It's perfect.
APPRAISER: Fantastic. And then, in the back here...
GUEST: This is the Little Prince as he is disappearing from the planet that he was visiting to go back to his planet, hopefully. It's just a wonderful fable. It's for children and adults, and it's one of my very, very, very favorites.
APPRAISER: So what we have is the first edition of The Little Prince. I'm not going to try and pronounce it in French, because I'll do it badly. (chuckles) And I can say Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, but you can maybe say it
better than me, or does that work?
GUEST: No, it's perfect, very nice.
APPRAISER: Okay, thank you-- he was a French writer. He was also-- he delivered the mail by plane. So he, he has a couple of other books that talk about that part of his life. During World War II, he was living in New York, which is when this was published, in 1943. Reynal and Hitchcock were the publishers, and they published it in English and in French. In '43, they did 525 copies of the book, signed by him. That was the first edition in English, which was in America. And then they did half that amount in French, 260 copies.
GUEST: Oh! And this is copy number 51.
APPRAISER: Right, and it's signed by him. Usually somebody else did the numbering. And one of the things we look for in having the book be as complete as possible is that all 260 had their number also written on the spine at the bottom.
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: So we've got another 51. It needs to be in the same hand, which it appears to be. The dust jackets rarely survive. Yours has survived, which is fantastic. There are, I think, approximately 140 or 150 million copies of the book...
GUEST: Mm.
APPRAISER:...have been printed since then.
GUEST: Wow.
APPRAISER: He only signed the, the numbers that we talked about. That's one of the things that is so incredibly special. He touched it, you touched it. That book means so much to you.
GUEST: I think Saint-Exupéry was a pretty cool dude...
APPRAISER: (chuckles)
GUEST: ...and he's never been found.
APPRAISER: Right.
GUEST: His plane went down, and he disappeared.
APPRAISER: Would you be surprised if I told you that at auction, that would sell for between $8,000 and $12,000?
GUEST: (whispering): Oh, my God. (aloud, laughing): Yeah, I'd be very surprised.
APPRAISER: Well, I've just told you. Wow, that's amazing. It's utterly amazing.
(chuckles)
APPRAISER: It's a great buy, $1.25.
GUEST: Yeah. Nice R.O.I.
$8,000 - $12,000 Auction
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Understanding Our Appraisals
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