Book Breaker, Otto Ege

Biblioclasty or Bibliophilia?

Leaf 47: “Book of Hours: Horæ Beatae Mariæ Virginis.” Latin, 15th century. Otto F. Ege: Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts.

Otto Frederick Ege (1888-1951) was the most prolific biblioclast (book breaker) of the modern age.¹ He was a major player in “the leaf trade.”²

In the late 1940s, art historian 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.³ His boxes were titled “Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts,” and is composed largely of folios from books for church services such as missals, psalters, and hymnals, as well as personal prayer books such as the Books of Hours.⁴

Breaking up Books as Edifying

As an advocate for art education in the general public, Ege expressed his trust in experiential learning and he had faith that breaking up books and disseminating historical scripts and texts would be edifying for a wider public.⁵

In his comprehensive study of Ege, Scott Gwara introduces Ege as "the fons et origo of middle class American manuscript connoisseurship"— an entrepreneur who created the niche market for single leaves as part of a populist evangelism of the decorative arts but who also must be viewed with significant skepticism.”⁶ Ege was a prolific writer and a search of his name at WorldCat provides hundreds of citation to his writing and collecitions he assembled.⁷

The Ege Manuscript Leaf Portfolios

Fred Porcheddu and other researchers at Denison University have established a website for images, descriptions, and other information about Otto Ege and his leaves as an attempt to "virtually" reconstruct the component manuscripts, as well as to promote the study of one of the most important figures of 20th-century book collecting.⁸

Stony Brook University Libraries has digitized their collection.

1. Ege, Otto. “I am a Biblioclast.” Avocations vol. I (March, 1938):516-18.

2. Wieck, Roger S. “Folia Fugitiva: The Pursuit of the Illuminated Manuscript Leaf.” Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 54 (January, 1996): 233–54.

3. Porcheddu, Fred. “Otto F. Ege: Teacher, Collector, and Biblioclast.” Art Documentation 26.1 (Spring 2007) 4-15.; Otto F. Ege Collection: The Ege Manuscript Leaf Portfolios. Denison University, Granville, Ohio.

4. Chen, W. Fiona.(nd). “Tearing Books for Education's Sake: Otto Ege and His Manuscript Leaves.” Medieval Art and the American Public: A Digital Narrative.

5. Ibid.

6. Gwara, Scott. 2013. Otto Ege's manuscripts: a study of Ege's manuscript collections, portfolios, and retail trade : with a comprehensive handlist of manuscripts collected or sold. Cayce, SC : De Brailes Publishing.

7. Otto Ege. See Worldcat Examples: Ege, Otto F. 1950. Original leaves from famous Bibles: nine centuries 1121-1935 A.D. [Cleveland, Ohio]; Ege, Otto F. 1980. Fifteen original Oriental manuscript leaves of six centuries: twelve of the Middle East, two of Russia and one of Tibet from the collection of and with notes. [Cleveland, Ohio]; Ege, Otto F. n.d. [A group of eleven original leaves showing the evolution of humanistic book hands and Roman types from Jenson to Rogers.].

8. Otto F. Ege Collection: The Ege Manuscript Leaf Portfolios. Denison University, Granville, Ohio.