From Andrew Lackie, Littera Scripta

Thank you for asking me to participate in your survey.

Rather than address your questions point by point, please allow me to answer indirectly.

Your questions all come down to the “Otto Ege conundrum” - should manuscripts /leaves be solely in the hands of scholars and institutions or available to the common man? Ege defended his practice of unbinding books in “I am a Biblioclast,” an essay published in in the March, 1938 issue of Avocations. “Surely to allow a thousand people ‘to have and to hold’ an original manuscript leaf, and to get the thrill and understanding that comes only from actual and frequent contact is justification enough for the scattering of fragments,” he wrote. “Few, indeed, can hope to own a complete manuscript book; hundreds, however, may own a leaf.”

I, unlike Ege, do not approve of intact books being dismembered.  I follow ILAB’s policy on the preservation…