Richard Porson’s Famous Handwriting

Although he published little, the Cambridge classicist Richard Porson (1759–1808) is best known for his insight into Greek meter, accentuation, and orthography. He was apparently skeptical of Granville Sharp’s rule about the use of the Greek article that has been so important to New Testament studies. he was even suspected by some of having written a tract against it under the pseudonym “Gregory Blunt” (pun intended). More popularly, he was known for “an astonishing memory, a turn for satire and badinage, beautiful penmanship, personal slovenliness, and alcoholism” (Naiditch, xxi). But Porson denied having written it and his biographer agrees (Watson, 267–270). His greatest legacy, as far as I am concerned, is his Greek handwriting that was turned into what I consider the best Greek typeface ever designed in Britain. 

The original characters were cut by Richard Austin and cast by Caslon and Catherwood. Austin was paid 22 pounds and 7 shillings. It was first used in 1809 in E. D. Clarke’s Greek Marbles brought from the shores of the Euxine. Its simplicity and lack of ligatures made it easy to read so that it was quickly copied and by the mid 19th century it was “almost universal in Britain” (Bowman, 2). You can see it in all sorts of books from Metzger’s Lexical Aids to Westcott and Hort’s GNT to Loeb Classical Library. One reviewer at the time compared the new type to the “disgustingly luxuriant” types of Bodoni and said that, in contrast, “the eye of the scholar now peruses, with a satisfaction bordering on delight, the porsonic type” (Bowman, 2). 

Porson’s Book Notes from c. 1800 (source)

Porson’s handwriting

The original type specimen from Cambridge University Press (from Bowman)

It was also used for the early editions of the UBS Greek New Testament but this changed—to Metzger’s chagrin. He says that he was not happy about the change to the “less attractive and harder to read [type] than the beautiful Porson font of Greek type that I had recommended for the earlier editions” (Reminiscences, 73). Kurt Aland admits as much in the intro to the NA26 (p. 43*) when he says “the font used [for NA26] is certainly lacking in the simplicity and clarity of that used for The Greek New Testament.” Given its ties to Cambridge, I tried to get the THGNT editors to use it but they went with Adobe Text instead (not a bad choice).

Westcott and Hort’s GNT (1881)

You can download a digital version of Porson from the Greek Font Society.

Further reading

• Bottomley, Grace, “The Legacy of Richard Porson’s Handwriting,” Eton College Collections.
• Brink, C. O. English Classical Scholarship: Historical Reflections on Bentley, Porson, and Housman (New York: James Clarke & Co.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
• Bowman, J. H. Greek Printing Types in Britain from the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century: A Catalogue, Occasional Publications 25 (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1992).
• Naiditch, P. G. The Library of Richard Porson (Xlibris, 2011).
• Watson, J. S. The life of Richard Porson, M. A., professor of Greek in the University of Cambridge from 1792 to 1808 (London, 1861).
• Mosley, J. M. ‘Porson’s Greek types’, Penrose Annual, vol. 54 (1960), pp. 36–40. [See blog]
• Porson, Richard. Letters to Mr. Archdeacon Travis, in answer to his defence of the three heavenly witnesses, I John v.7 (London: 1970).
• Geoffrey V. Morson, ‘Porson, Richard (1759–1808)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/22550, accessed 20 Oct 2015]