New College Christmas Card 2025
(The actual card format is landscape (21 x 9.5 cm).)
Greetings: All Good Wishes for Christmas and the New Year
Purchase a pack of ten cards (including postage & packing) from Oxford University Stores for £6.95 (UK); £8.95 (Rest of the World):
https://www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk/product-catalogue/new-college/old-members-friends-merchandise/new-college-christmas-card-2025
(If you are unable to order via the Stores, you can also purchase by phoning the Development Office on (0)1865 279509.)
This fine engraving by Frenchman Charles Dupuis of a splendid work of art by his compatriot Louis Laguerre depicts the Adoration of the Magi. It is one of the famous illustrations within John Baskett’s spectacular 1716–17 printing of the King James Version of the Bible, published by Oxford’s Clarendon Press, and comes at the opening of the Gospel of St Matthew. A beautiful and celebrated book, it is generally known by its sobriquet the ‘Vinegar Bible’. That is on account of its notorious mistranscription of ‘The parable of the vineyard’ as ‘The parable of the vinegar’—but one of numerous printing errors in Baskett’s work, which also earned the book the nickname a ‘Baskett full of errors’.
New College Library’s copy of this two-volume book was once owned by New College scholar and fellow Robert Lowth (1710–1787), the biblical scholar and sometime Oxford professor of poetry, bishop of Oxford, and bishop of London. This copy of the first volume includes a dedication in Latin to Lowth’s son, Thomas Henry Lowth, also a fellow here, who died at the age of twenty-four; the Adoration of the Magi appears in volume two.
The Holy Bible, containing the Old Testament and the New (Oxford: John Baskett, Clarendon Press, 1717, 1716)
New College Library, Oxford, BT3.282.1
© Courtesy of the Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford
