My personal favorite is Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s dedication on The Little Prince. What are your favorites?
“To Leon Werth
I ask children to forgive me for dedicating this book to a grown-up. I have a serious excuse; this grown-up is the best friend I have in the world. I have another excuse: this grown-up can understand everything, even books for children. I have a third excuse: he lives in France where he is hungry and cold. He needs to be comforted. If all these excuses are not enough, then I want to dedicate this book to the child whom this grown-up once was. All grown-ups were children first. (But few of them remember it.) So I correct my dedication:
To Leon Werth When he was a little boy”
I adore the one for Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Salman Rushdie wrote it for his son Zafar who was 11 at the time and who he felt he couldn’t see without endangering because he was in deep hiding as a result of the fatwah. The book is both a children’s story and an allegory for what Rushdie was going for and his explanation to his son as to why he was absent. It goes like this: