Congratulations to librarian Allison McCormack who was recently awarded the H.W. Wilson Foundation Research Award for her project Beyond Ege: Biblioclasm and the Broken Book Market in 20th Century North America. 

The award was presented by the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) during their annual conference in Montreal. Each year, they “recognize a slate of people and projects that have made an impact on the society and on art information and visual resources management.”  

McCormack’s project works to “uncover the history of the Foliophiles and prompt further study in the biblioclastic networks that supported the study of book history through the circulation of individual leaves.” She plans to incorporate her research into a book chapter and hopes that it leads to a broader investigation of the Foliophiles. The book chapter will be in the Routledge Companion to Textual Scholarship, with an estimated publication date of early 2028. “I’m grateful to receive support from ARLIS/NA for my research,” shared McCormack. “Traveling to libraries and archives across the country can be very costly, and I wouldn’t be able to make these trips without their generous grant.”  

About the Foliophiles 

The Foliophiles marketed themselves as a book lover’s organization, but they primarily cut up books and manuscripts to sell off the leaves and pages individually. While today many would find this horrifying, it was a common practice until very recently. For better or worse, this “biblioclasm” is the reason why a large number of American college and university libraries have any medieval documents at all. “My research seeks to uncover more information about the Foliophiles so we can not only see which books and manuscripts they dispersed, but hopefully start reassembling these fragments using digital technologies,” explained McCormack. 

McCormack has been looking into the Foliophiles for some time now but hit a lot of dead ends. Unlike other book-breakers such as the infamous Otto Ege, not a lot has been written about the Foliophiles either in print or online. “I expect that publishing this book chapter will be the first step in a multi-year project to chart the work of this organization and uncover the full extent of their bookselling activities,” noted McCormack. “I’m excited to see what I’ll find in the archives and let others know about my discoveries.” 

For more information about the award, the full press release is available on the Art Libraries Society of North America website. To learn more about the Society’s Awards and recognitions, check out their descriptions. 

For more information about the leaves feature in this post, check out the collection here. Catalog records for all of the manuscript leaves in our collection can be found here.