Scattered Leaves

The Symposium Remaking the Book was held at the University of Saskatchewan in June of 2005, just after I retired from the library there. The General Information page explains how manuscript pages separated from their original books ended up in different locations stored in boxes. I worked in Special Collections for a few years and came across the box of manuscript pages almost by accident. They are quite wonderful to look at and to hold. One of my fondest memories is of a grandmother and her grandson examining the pages, with the proper gloves covering their hands, I might add (although I've since learned that white cotton gloves are not always (or maybe ever) better than clean careful hands). I found this out during one of the MOOC classes I've been taking. Of course, I can't find that particular reference now, so I did a Google search for 'manuscripts using cotton gloves' and found some interesting articles, including this blog post on the subject from the British Library.

The online exhibit, Scattered Leaves which is part of the Symposium mentioned above, reproduces the pages, and magnifies some of the elements of those pages, of the manuscripts mentioned above. (Hint - there is no magnifier for the individual pages; you have to click on the underlined words in the accompanying text).

These collections of manuscript pages, as you will see from the links above, are called the Otto Ege Portfolios, and are held by many different libraries around the world. There is a very short Wikipedia article about Ege which has a few links but if you just do a Google search on Otto Ege, you can find links to other online copies of the collections, with digital versions of the pages, including the one from the Kelvin Smith Library at Case Western Reserve University.

By the way, seeing these reproductions on the Web is great, but if you live near a library with a Special Collections department, go there. You never know what you might find - maybe not medieval manuscript pages, but possibly letters from famous authors, copies of government documents from decades ago, rare books, or other wondrous finds.