"Deathless fragments within the reach of many …": Tracing Four Decades of Manuscript Fragmentation via the Lima (OH) Public Library Staff Loan Fund Association Archive

Abstract

Abstract: The breaking and dispersal of Otto Ege's manuscripts have been the subject of focused scholarly inquiry for nearly three decades, with new discoveries and insights emerging with regularity as more scholars and collectors work to uncover previously unrecognized and unrecorded Ege manuscript fragments in an attempt to reconstruct their original codicological and historical contexts. But the historical records of Ege's biblioclasm are just as fragmentary as the manuscripts he broke, and much remains unknown about the business practices, partnerships, and processes that facilitated the distribution of his manuscripts' pages. Drawing upon a new cache of archival documentation discovered by the author, this article sheds new light on one of Ege's most important commercial partnerships, highlighting his decades-long enterprise with the Lima (OH) Public Library to market and sell fragments to their mutual financial benefit and for the first time revealing the full statistical and financial extent of the Ege-Lima partnership—and its lasting impact on the distribution of medieval manuscripts across North America (and beyond).