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”
“The dedication of this book is split seven ways: to Neil, to Jessica, to David, to Kenzie, to Di, to Anne, and to you, if you have stuck with Harry until the very end.”
JKR is a bigot, but the dedication in the last Harry Potter book still makes me emotional. The ending of the series literally marked the ending of my childhood, I moved out of my parents’ house that summer. It’s always gonna mean a lot to me.
I’m surprised I had to scroll down so far to find this comment. It hurts like hell now because of her betrayal, but that dedication literally brought tears to my eyes when I cracked open my copy for the very first time at a midnight release party in a bookstore chain that no longer exists. Good memories. That summer was incredible.