Otto F. Ege Collection The Ege Manuscript Leaf Portfolios In the
late 1940s, longtime Cleveland resident and art historian Otto
F. Ege selected fifty medieval manuscripts from his personal
collection and removed several dozen individual pages from each
one. He mounted each leaf onto a large paper mat using tape
hinges, and added a descriptive label to the mat. He then put
one leaf from each of the fifty component manuscripts into a
durable portfolio box; each of the resulting boxed sets thus
contained a different leaf from each of the fifty original
manuscripts. Forty boxes containing fifty leaves each were made
in this way, and were offered for sale to university and public
libraries around North America. This was an extraordinary thing
to do. For centuries, the act of biblioclasty (literally, "book-
breaking") has been reviled--in most people's minds there exists
an urge to protect books, especially old ones, and to view
cutting pieces out of them as nearly acute a crime as burning
them outright. But Ege's i