[2] In 1533 John Hochstraten, the exiled Antwerp printer, issued a book by Gau entitled The Richt vay to the Kingdome of Heuine ("The Right way to the Kingdom of Heaven"), of which the chief interest is that it is the first Scottish book written on the side of the Reformers,[2] but it became just one of several translations of Lutheran prose works attacking the Scottish church.
[3] It is a translation of Christiern Pedersen's Den rette vey till Hiemmerigis Rige (Antwerp, 1531), for the most part direct, but showing intimate knowledge in places of the German edition by Urbanus Rhegius.
It has been assumed that all the copies were shipped from Malmö to Scotland, and that the cargo was intercepted by the Scottish officers on the look out for the heretical works which were printed abroad in large numbers.
The evidence that the book is a translation was first given by Sonnenstein Wendt in a paper "Om Reformatorerna i Malmö," in Rördam’s Ny Kirkehistoriske Samlinger, ii.
[2] The online magazine The Bottle Imp established the John Gau of Malmö Prize to recognise and encourage the study of Scottish literature in the Nordic region.