As will be seen from the following extracts, it is probable that the First Edition consisted of 250 copies, and that 50 of these were forwarded to London:
“In response to Borrow’s letter of February 27th, the Committee resolved ‘to authorise Mr. Borrow to print 250 copies of the Gospel of St. Luke, without the Vocabulary, in the Rummanee dialect, and to engage the services of a competent person to translate the Gospel of St. Luke by way of trial in the dialect of the Spanish Basque.’”—[Letters of George Borrow to the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1911, pp. 205–206.]
“A small impression of the Gospel of St. Luke, in the Rommany, or Gitano, or Gipsy language, has been printed at Madrid, under the superintendence of this same gentleman, who himself made the translation for the benefit of the interesting, singular, degraded race of people whose name it bears, and who are very numerous in some parts of Spain. He has likewise taken charge of the printing of the Gospel of St. Luke, in the Cantabrian, or Spanish Basque language, a translation of which had fallen into his hands.”—[Thirty-Fourth Annual Report of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1838, p. xliii.]
“All the Testaments were stopped at the custom house, they were contained in two large chests. . . . The chests, therefore, with the hundred Gospels in Gitano and Basque [probably 50 copies of each] for the Library of the Bible Society are at present at San Lucar in the custom house, from which I expect to receive to-morrow the receipt which the authorities here demand.”—[Borrow’s letter to the Rev. A. Brandram, Seville, May 2nd, 1839.]
A Second Edition of the Gospel was printed in London in 1871. The collation is Duodecimo, pp. 117. This was followed by a Third Edition, London, 1872, the collation of which is also Duodecimo, pp. 117. Both bear the same imprint: “London: / Printed by William Clowes and Sons, Stamford Street, / and Charing Cross.”
For these London Editions the text was considerably revised.
The Gospel of St. Luke in the Basque dialect, referred to in the above paragraphs, is a small octavo volume bearing the following title-page:
Evangelioa / San Lucasen Guissan / El Evangelio segun S. Lucas. / Traducido al vascuence. / Madrid: / Imprenta de la Campañia Tipografica / 1838.
The translation was the work of a Basque physician named Oteiza, and Borrow did little more than see it through the press. The book has, therefore, no claim to rank as a Borrow princeps.
The measure of success which attended his efforts to reproduce the Gospel of St. Luke in these two dialects is best told in Borrow’s own words:
“I subsequently published the Gospel of St. Luke in the Rommany and Biscayan languages. With respect to the first, I beg leave to observe that no work printed in Spain ever caused so great and so general a sensation, not so much amongst the Gypsies, for whom it was intended, as amongst the Spaniards themselves, who, though they look upon the Roma with some degree of contempt, nevertheless take a strange interest in all that concerns them. . . . Respecting the Gospel in Basque I have less to say. It was originally translated into the dialect of Guipuscoa by Dr. Oteiza, and subsequently received corrections and alterations from myself. It can scarcely be said to have been published, it having been prohibited and copies of it seized on the second day of its appearance. But it is in my power to state that it is anxiously expected in the Basque provinces, where books in the aboriginal tongue are both scarce and dear.”—[Borrow’s Survey of his last two years in Spain, printed in his Letters to the Bible Society, 1911, pp. 360–361.]
There is a copy of the First Edition of The Gospel of St. Luke in the dialect of the Spanish Gypsies in the Library of the British Museum. The Press-mark is C.51.aa.12. The Museum also possesses a copy of the Gospel in the Basque dialect; the Pressmark is C.51.aa.13.