00:00And that goes to the Harry Ransom Centre which is a big literary archive.
00:06To anyone specific, it appears to be the one he kept with correction and made his own corrections in towards the public.
00:13And then just one looking to me.
00:19My hair's probably doing something weird.
00:24To be honest, it's the moments in between the flipping.
00:29We had the opportunity to acquire this single piece from that collection
00:34because by far the most significant and exciting item in that
00:40and indeed for any collecting around Saint-Exupéry and the Little Prince
00:46this is the most considerable document that has ever been available for sale on the market for him.
00:56So it's here and it's this bit here.
00:59It's not particularly visually appealing but it is.
01:02To get any kind of creative material for the Little Prince is extremely rare.
01:13As I said, signed or inscribed copies are very, very hard to come by
01:17and anything like this is almost impossible
01:20because there's this minute window of time between when it was actually written and when he died.
01:24So it's very special.
01:41But the thing that's extraordinary about this one is that this is the third
01:46and most importantly only remaining that we are aware of available
01:51outside of what we like to in the rare book world call captivity in the wild copy.
02:00And this document represents the closest that any collector or dealer
02:06or people in this part of the trade are ever going to get to the original process of its making.
02:16I suspect that this is a nice historical document.
02:23If you look up famous quotes from the Petit Prince you'll find at the top of all of them
02:28the one where he says one cannot see properly except with the heart
02:33what is essential is invisible to the eye.
02:36And what's amazing about this manuscript or typescript is that he is correcting exactly that thought
02:42and formulating that exact phrasing for the first time in here
02:46particularly the part where he says about he finds the kind of key to the concept
02:51by saying here, on ne vois bien qu'avec le coeur
02:55you cannot see right except with the heart.
02:58Set up portrait style.
03:05Expertise in this field is an aggregation of years and decades of just seeing.
03:12It shows the exact folder in which Exupery had it to protect it and hold the loose pages together
03:20and actually you can see in the way that anyone who's got a schoolboy's notebook or whatever it is
03:25you would cover it in doodles and sketches and also there's even some mathematical notes
03:31probably financial calculations of costs and things he had to do.
03:35But what's particularly nice is that he did these sketches of heads
03:40and this one in particular you can see he's doing a sketch of the little prince
03:46and Exupery would constantly be drawing and redrawing figments and aspects of this character
03:54that really preoccupied his imagination so it's nice to have one inside the cover of the original.
03:59I mean it's not every day that we have something newsworthy of this level.
04:10Certainly when we did find that we were able to acquire this and make it available to our collectors
04:15that was a real high point for me professionally.
04:21I've been doing this for 13 years now and in terms of the quest that we as dealers and collectors
04:27and curators of libraries are all on the point is to get to the heart of the creative process
04:34to get to documents that speak to the heart of the creative process.
04:52I'm going to do some sort of flicking I guess.
04:57This is quite simply the most exceptional example of that that I've ever seen or had the opportunity to be involved with
05:05so yes it's a high point and I feel almost a little poignant about it
05:11because I don't quite see how I'm ever going to beat this.
05:17That would be nice.
05:20So...
05:24Translated.
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