Thread by @incunabula

Collecting 18th century Basque books (books printed in Basque for a Basque readership, not bilingual grammars etc) is a low cost hobby - not because the books are cheap, but because one comes along only every 10 years or so, so you can really spread the cost out...😎 1/

This "Testamen çaharreco eta berrico historoa" - a collection of historical stories from the Bible - was printed in Bayonne, in the French Basque country, in 1777. 2/

Until the 19th century, Basque was primarily a spoken language only, and although a number of dictionaries and grammars were published by Spanish philologists, books printed entirely in the Basque language for a local Basque readership are few and far between. 3/

The books, when you do find them, are usually in terrible condition, or heavily restored. This copy is still in its first plain calf binding, and has the ticket of the original bookseller who sold it in Bayonne on the front pastedown. 4/

There's a complete transcript of the text of the almost identical 1775 edition of this work downloadable as a PDF here:
klasikoak.armiarma.eus/idazlanak/L/La…
You can then use Google Translate to get the gist of the meaning, if your Basque, like mine, is not as fluent as it should be...🙄 5/

After a decade of intensive work in this field and almost daily searching of bookseller catalogues, I'm very pleased to have added this book to my library, which now brings the total number of 18th century Basque vernacular works in my collection to one. 🤣

This is not, btw, my smallest specialist collection. I've been actively collecting 19th century vernacular works in Albanian for over 5 years, also searching dealer catalogues near daily, and I have so far managed to accumulate only zero books.

The *combined* size of my collections of 18th century vernacular books in Basque (1), Albanian (0), Lithuanian (0) and Frisian (1) - all four languages very actively and intensively searched for over the last decade - is 2 books. On a positive note, shelfspace is not a problem.