John Rylands Library I listed status in 1994, is maintained by the University of Manchester and open for library readers and visitors. Enriqueta Rylands purchased a site on Deansgate for her memorial library in 1889 and commissioned a design from architect Basil Champneys. Rylands commissioned the Manchester academic Alice Cooke to index the vast library of the 2nd Earl Spencer which she had purchased and another collection of autographs. Mrs Rylands intended the library to be principally theological, and the building, which is a fine example of Victorian Gothic, has the appearance of a church, although the concept was of an Oxford college
Rylands Library Papyrus P52 Deansgate building. Although Rylands formula_1 is generally accepted as the earliest extant record of a canonical New Testament text, the dating of the papyrus is by no means the subject of consensus among scholars. The original editor proposed a date range of 100-150 CE; while a recent exercise by Pasquale Orsini and Willy Clarysse, aiming to generate consistent revised date estimates for all New Testament papyri written before the mid-fourth century, has proposed a date for formula_1 of 125-175 CE. But a few scholars say that considering the difficulty of fixing the date of a fragment based solely on paleographic