His "Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts" portfolios were part of his longstanding commitment to populist art education in North America. He authored dozens of articles on this subject in art education journals, and loaned materials to public book exhibits regularly. He had devoted his career to teaching book arts such as decoration, typography, and layout design to the general public, and he believed that the transformative beauty of medieval book decoration could inspire bookmakers today to greater heights of creativity. But Ege's impulse was actually a largely altruistic one.
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. Forty boxes containing fifty leaves each were made in this way, and were offered for sale to university and public libraries around North America. 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. He mounted each leaf onto a large paper mat using tape hinges, and added a descriptive label to the mat. Ege selected fifty medieval manuscripts from his personal collection and removed several dozen individual pages from each one. In the late 1940s, longtime Cleveland resident and art historian Otto F. Ege Collection The Ege Manuscript Leaf Portfolios
Rochester Institute of Technology Leaves.University of Massachusetts, Amherst Leaves.
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