Ege, Otto F.

Otto F. Ege was an art educator and collector notorious for his dismemberment of medieval manuscripts, which he re-sold in portfolios of single leaves. (From Library of Congress Authority File, https://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/no99020371.html)

As a young student at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art, Otto F. Ege (1888-1951) acquired an interest in fine printing and calligraphy, and as early as 1911, he began acquiring a fine collection of his own to feed that interest. After joining the faculty at the Museum School and later while working at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Ege proved to be an energetic teacher and organizer, but an even more energetic collector of rare manuscripts and early printed books, working on the side as a dealer in rare books to help build his collection.

Not long after his arrival in Cleveland in 1921, Ege conceived of the idea of breaking apart some of the imperfect manuscripts and printed works he had accumulated in order to create sets of individual leaves for sale to other collectors and libraries. A self-confessed biblioclast, "one of those strange, eccentric book-tearers," he was quite open about his decision to dismember manuscripts, apparently even complete ones. Although profit surely played a role, he defended his actions by arguing that by scattering leaves, he was able to share the beauties of medieval manuscripts with a wider audience and make it possible for people who could not afford an entire medieval manuscript, for example, to possess at least one leaf.

Eventually, Ege created six portfolios for sale made up of leaves taken from dismembered books. Two of these sets featured leaves from "famous books," one from editions of the Bible, and one each depicted the evolution of "oriental" manuscripts and the humanistic book hand. Ege launched his best known and in some respects most ambitious project in the late 1940s when he began to assemble the sets marketed as "Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts," a far-reaching effort to illustrate the history of the book, book illustration, and paleography. Although Ege died before the first set was sold, his wife eventually sold forty sets at the cost of $750 each. (From the guide to the Otto F. Ege, "Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts" MS 570., 12th-15th century, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries)