Cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.
Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books by decree in 1586, it is the second oldest university press after Cambridge University Press.
Last year the University Press announced it would be changing its branding and logo which had served it so well and was iconic the world over. The new branding was designed by an agency named Superunion with refinements by typographer and logo designer Rob Clarke.
The new logo featured Oxford’s name and an icon showing the turning pages of a book forming the ‘O’ of the popular university press. It represented Oxford’s heritage as a print publisher, and its transformation to a future of multi-format content publishing. Or so they say.
The old OUP logo had the university coat of arms in which was the Latin quote: Dominus illuminatio mea. This is Latin for 'The Lord is my light’. It is the incipit (or opening words) of Psalm 27 from which the motto of the university was taken.
That motto has been in use there since at least the second half of the sixteenth century, and it appears in the coat of arms of the university. The origins of the motto shdes light (no pun intended) on the origins of the mission of the university as it was back then. Roman Catholic priest and theologian Ivan Illich explained that ancient university motto was being formulated around a time when scientists were progressively replacing the concept of vision as a gaze radiating from the pupil by the concept of vision as the retinal perception of an image formed by reflected sunlight. Illich wrote, “To interpret De oculo morali, the relationship of things to God "who is light" must be understood. This is the century (i.e. the thirteenth century) suffused by the idea that the world rests in God's hands, that it is contingent on Him. This means that at every instant everything derives its existence from his continued creative act. Things radiate by virtue of their constant dependence on this creative act. They are alight by the God-derived luminescence of their truth.”
It seems the Oxford University Press, in all its wisdom, threw out hundreds of years of tradition in the name of digital transformation to advance knowledge to all fours corners of the globe. In other words just another bland soulless corporate entity. As one critic said Oxford had gone from ‘maybe god will read your book, but no one else’ to ‘look here’s a visual representation of the drain your book will disappear down’.
