Pare that too Che Guevara had read The little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The world’s largest book collector is convinced of this, the Swiss entrepreneur JeanMarc Probst. He discovered traces of this predilection in a memoir on the legend of the Cuban revolution.
With the ineffable cigar in his mouth Che relaxed by reading the story of the meeting between an aviatorforced by a breakdown to make an emergency landing in the desert, and a child originally from space where he had only a rose for companion – who asks him to draw a sheep for him.
The Little Prince forever
One wonders, in fact, who hasn’t read this longseller yet. From the year of its release, April 6, 1943, first in English and then in French (the original manuscript is kept in the Morgan Library in New York), The little Prince continued to grind copies after copies: there is talk of at least 200 million texts sold spread across over 470 languages and different dialects including Sanskrit, Old Prussian and the Egyptian hieroglyphic version to name a few.
A global success – which this year marks the eightieth anniversary of its first publication – which has generated, over time, a feverish passion among collectors, and an endless explosion of exhibitions, shows, films, museums and marketing products all over the world (from moleskine to sneakers to face creams).
The Little Prince: the events of 2023
Some events of 2023: the homonymous musical directed by Stefano Genovese departed from the Sistine Chapel and currently in Florence before continuing to Assago, Milan, the newly opened museum in South Korea, in Jeju Island, which has already totaled 12 million tourists, to name a few.
And then a big one immersive exhibition in April in Miami, an installation in the Lello bookshop in Porto (where Harry Potter was born) until April and, among other innumerable initiatives, also the publication of a new edition in eighty languages by a German publisher.
In Italy, in Alghero, the last city he saw alive the aviator writer before his disappearance, there is the Mase, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Museum),
An edition of The Little Prince in Ukrainian
«The little Prince gives answers to all thanks to its universal and secular message of values such as friendship, love, compassion and altruism» explains Jean-Marc Probst (who owns 6,600 editions in over 300 languages and dialects) who divides readers and “fans” into four categories: «There are those who find a response to the great existential themes, who consolation after a loss, who sees a manifesto to friendship and who, finally, buys it for its literary depth suitable for everyone».
Probst has been collecting copies since 1980, when he discovered a translated book in a shop window in Japan. Among his “treasures” today are the first two editions in English and French of 1943 which, just recently, he made available for an exhibition in Paris.
A collection of over 6 thousand pieces
In 2013 he wanted to secure this heritage through the Jean-Marc Probst Petit Prince Foundation with which he also does good: he “uses” The Little Prince to reach underprivileged children. He financed a Somali translation for the children of Somaliland.
And, now, with Antonio Fragomeni, the greatest Italian collector (contemplates 2500 editions, one of which translated into Tuareg), has just given life to a Ukrainian-Italian edition as a gift and for the refugees of Kiev to read the text in a school in Naples.
«When they ask me why I collect The little Prince I always answer that it’s a matter of emotions. His words create bonds» underlines Fragomeni. “One can only see well with the heart”, he says in the book.
An ending shrouded in mystery
The incredible aspect of the whole story is that its author has never held his work in his hands. Saint-Exupéry had worked on it for a long time, manicly, since the 1930s, amid countless revisions, rewrites and cancellations.
But when the text is published he had already left New York (where he lived in exile with his wife) to return to fight as a pilot in Franci. The rest is known. The writer disappeared the following year, on July 31, 1944, at the end of an adventurous life. He is shot down by a German Luftwaffe aircraft after taking off on a reconnaissance from a military base in Corsica for Lyon.
He was 44 years old. Over the years various reconstructions have alternated on its end. A bracelet and wreckage from the plane were found off Marseille, but there are also those who claim that in reality he would have been saved and taken refuge in Bermuda before dying in 1994.
A book by the French mystery writer Michael Bussi, Code 612 (E/O editions), merges various hypotheses into Club 612, a secret association that brings together experts of the Little Prince.
Charming and capricious man
Antoine De Saint Exupery with his wife Consuelo in Paris. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)
Who was the author of The Little Prince
«Saint-Exupéry is like Elvis Presleyalso of the singer it is said that he never died» notes Romana Petri, author of the intense novel about his life Steal the night (Mondadori), nominated for the Strega prize.
It starts from his childhood, from when his mother called him “Sun King” because he was capricious, centralizing, extravagant, he infected everyone with his poems, her in the first place for which he will always have a morbid attachment.
He talks about his first flight attempts, of when he gets an internal combustion engine as a gift to create a “flying plane“. Then work for the aeropostal company that regularly takes him on flights for five thousand kilometres, from Toulouse to Dakar, to transport the mail, “the words of others”, as he wrote to his mother.
The Little Prince is a hypnotic book
Of the accident in the desert where he is saved by a Bedouin, of the fascination for night flying at the time a nightmare for pilots. Until he meets the love of his life, the Salvadoran writer Consuelo Suncín-Sandoval Zeceña de Gómez, to whom he will ask to marry him after a few hours but who he will cheat on with dozens of lovers while writing her hundred-page love letters (of them he will say narcissistically, “they were like waiting rooms”).
“The truth is, he wished he’d been a kid forever, did not accept the concept of the time, his tragedy is that he understood it immediately as a child; yet he was fascinating and visionary. He always spoke of stars and flowers; if he wanted to pay a compliment he used them as comparisons »continues Petri who imagines him in the last moments of his life with Lawrence of Arabia.
«The Little Prince is a hypnotic, almost metaphysical book, it is a treatise against violence, but it is also his will. That child who dies stung by a snake has always made one think of an announcement of suicide, the rose was his wife Consuelo, the asteroid 612 was the result of his studies as a numerologist. In short, the sum of its existence» concludes Petri. Of him, after all, the truest and most copied phrase ever: The essential is invisible to the eye.
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