The Bible in Spain
Borrow spent five years in Spain distributing Protestant bibles for the British and Foreign Bible Society, and wrote up the experience as a picaresque narrative of mules, inns, smugglers and officials. It is a travel book that reads like a novel, and Borrow is a narrator who is always the most interesting person in the room.
The book is partisan and often unreliable, and its attitude to Catholicism is hostile. It is also one of the best accounts we have of Spain in the 1830s, during the Carlist wars, and of the practical difficulty of moving a book across a country with almost no roads.
Public-domain status
First published in 1843. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; George Borrow died in 1881, so this work has been free to republish there since 1952.
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- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 415 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
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