[NOUVEAU TESTAMENT] Ko te kawenata hou, o To tatou ariki te kai wakaora. A ihu karaiti. He mea wakamaori i te reo kariki

Very rare translation of the New Testament into the Maori language, undertaken by the Anglican missionaries established in the North Island from 1823 (Henry and Marianne Williams), cf. Deschamps, L'Imprimerie hors d'Europe, pp. 132-33.

Full calf binding in light brown, plain spine, rubbed spine and covers, joints restored, small losses along the joints, corners softened, sprinkled edges, a modest and fragile contemporary binding.

Pleasant internal condition.

It was in 1835 that Henry and Marianne Williams founded their printing workshop, and this work would appear to be the first they published, appropriately so.

The priority sometimes attributed to an edition of the Epistles to the Ephesians and the Philippians, said to have come off the same press in 1835, founders on the lesser necessity of these two isolated Pauline texts for the first evangelical preaching. This is not, however, the first book printed in New Zealand: by that date only one other had appeared in the colony, a "Polynesian mythology…" printed in Auckland in 1835. Cf. Deschamps, p. 9.