According to Menéndez y Pelayo, the whole sentence would be clear if the clause, “pues no hizo tantas necedades de industria,” were not one of negation. It seems to me possible and practicable to remove the negative meaning from the clause without omitting or changing any words that are now found in the text. The clause may be made affirmative, emphatically affirmative, by resorting to the rhetorical device of converting it into a negative interrogation. The sentence may as a result appear complicated, but orally expressed it would not seem unnatural or forced. The passage, with this change in punctuation, would read: “Con todo eso, os digo que merecía el que lo compuso, pues, ¿no hizo tantas necedades de industria? que le echaran á galeras por todos los días de su vida.”
_Tirant Lo Blanch_ was first published in Valencia, in 1490. Of this edition there are three copies extant: one in the British Museum, another in the Biblioteca Provincial in Valencia, and the third in the library of the Hispanic Society of New York.[3] Mr. Archer M. Huntington, founder of the above Society and a distinguished patron of Spanish letters, had two hundred facsimile copies made from the last one mentioned.[4] One of these was used in the investigations connected with this dissertation.
[3] For the history and description of these three copies see D. Isidro Bonsoms y Sicart, _La Edición príncipe del “Tirant lo Blanch” Cotejo de los tres ejemplares impresos en Valencia, en 1490, únicos conocidos hoy día_ (_Discursos leídos en la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona en la recepción pública de D. Isidro Bonsoms y Sicart_, Barcelona, 1907). Also see Juan Givanel Mas, _Estudio crítico de Tirant lo Blanch_, Madrid, 1912; pp. 27-34.
A second edition was published in Barcelona, in 1497. While I was in that city in the summer of 1915, I saw fragments of a copy of this edition in the Institut d’Estudis Catalans. It is to these fragments that Givanel Mas refers in the following words: “Los únicos pliegos que se conocen hoy día de la edición barcelonesa de 1497 del Tirant lo Blanch, se hallan en la Biblioteca del Institut d’Estudis Catalans; comprenden desde el capítulo ccxviiii al ccccxciii y del ccccxxxix al ccccxlv.”[5]