Many people did not notice the 10 year gap, as Laurent also showed exceptional talent in drawing elephants. Jean de Brunhoff was trained as a painter, and what strikes one first about his preliminary drawings for “Babar” is how much more conventionally masterly—the work of an obviously accomplished draftsman—they look than the final drawings do. Laurent de Brunhoff, who was 12 when his father died, continued the Babar series after his father’s death. Unfortunately for said cousins Arthur and Celeste, they didn't exactly have said permission to go to this far away land where Babar lives.

Until he becomes homesick for the forest and goes back, promising to visit the old lady again (I couldn't help but feel sorry for her, after all she did for him). The book was taken out of print in the 1960s, after Toni Morrison, then an editor at Random House, protested the depiction of "savages". Once he arrives at the forest, he's made king, gets married, and is off to who knows where for his honeymoon. It's not a bad book, mind you, but thinking back, and looking at this book through a 21st-century perspective, it can be questionable. On the drive there, he becomes engaged to the girl elephant, not even mourning his recent split from Old Lady.There are now over 30,000 Babar publications in over 17 languages, and over 8 million books have been sold. And the traffic between the exotic elephant and the French nursery is already implied, in a more complex form, in Matisse’s “The Moroccans,” of the same year, in which the remote decorative style of French-colonized Africa is rephrased in terms of the metropolitan faux-naïf. A neatly printed vintage Christmas 1982 gift inscription at the upper left corner of the half title page. Lovely first printing of the second Babar book, published only a year after the elephant's first adventure.

Mina considers them "civilized and gentle", but Allan denies that their leader is really wearing a crown.Fine clothbound hardcover with light indications of shelving/handling in a Near Fine dust jacket with a hint of rubbing to the extremities and a touch of shelf wear. Babar's Travels was removed from the shelves by library staff in East Sussex in response to parental complaints for what was perceived as stereotypes of Africans. No DJ; Lovely unsoiled large book with pictorial cover, 8 1/2 x 12 1/4 inches; small lamination wrinkle with shelfwear on front and back. He gets them some clothes and tries to make them conform to the posh society but decides this is his chance to escape and dumps his girlfriend and heads back to the forest. The pro-page-twoers think that without the incident the story is robbed of motive and pathos; the anti-page-twoers think that it’s just too hard, too early, and too brutal, so they turn the story into one of a little elephant who merely wanders into Paris—not such a bad premise.

The first two of Jean de Brunhoff's Babar books have inspired two major concert works: L'Histoire de Babar, le petit éléphant ( The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant) by Francis Poulenc in 1940; and The Travels of Babar (Le Voyage de Babar) by Raphael Mostel in 1994. After his mother is killed by a hunter, Babar escapes to the city, where he meets The Old Lady and becomes educated living among men. SIGNED BY LAURENT DE BRUNHOFF on what would be the half-title with an original drawing of Babar and one of the children; no inscription.The de Brunhoffs’ saga is not an unconscious expression of the French colonial imagination; it is a self-conscious comedy about the French colonial imagination and its close relation to the French domestic imagination.