Biblioclasty:
Book burning is the ritual destruction by fire of books or other written materials, usually carried out in a public context. The burning of books represents an element of censorship and usually proceeds from a cultural, religious, or political opposition to the materials in question. [Wikipedia]
But apparently not always. Noted in “The Ege Manuscript Leaf Portfolios,” Greta Smith and Fred Porcheddu, Denison Library:
In the late 1940s, longtime Cleveland resident and art historian Otto F. 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.
Sample page.
This was an extraordinary thing to do. 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. But Ege’s impulse was actually a largely altruistic one. 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. He authored dozens of articles on this subject in art education journals, and loaned materials to public book exhibits regularly. His “Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts” portfolios were part of his longstanding commitment to populist art education in North America.
If you happen to know of one these portfolios in private hands, Denison University may want to know. See the above link.
