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”
“Favourite” is the wrong word, but Rebecca West’s dedication in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her travelogue of pre-WW2 Yugoslavia gives me goosebumps every time I read it or think about it. Published in 1941, after the Nazi invasion. It reads:
“To my friends in Yugoslavia, who are now all dead or enslaved.”