John Rylands John Rylands John Rylands (7 February 1801 – 11 December 1888) was an English entrepreneur and philanthropist. He was the owner of the largest textile manufacturing concern in the United Kingdom, and Manchester's first multi-millionaire. After having learned to weave, Rylands became a small-scale manufacturer of hand-looms, while also working in the draper's shop which his father had opened in St Helens. He displayed a "precocious shrewdness" for retailing, and in partnership with his two elder brothers expanded into the wholesale trade. So successful were they that, in 1819, Rylands' father merged his retail business with theirs, creating the firm
Rylands Library Papyrus P52 formula_1, nevertheless continued to maintain that "The Rylands papyrus may therefore be accepted as of the first half of the second century". An altogether different approach to dating New Testament payri has been proposed by a number of paleographers in recent years, drawing on the notion of "graphic stream" developed by Guglielmo Cavallo. Rather than comparing letter forms of undated papyri directly with dated comparators, it is proposed that the hand in question should first be identified to a graphic stream representing the overall development of a particular handwriting style. "The way that individual letters are formed within these graphic