The Jessie L. Clough Art Memorial for Teaching: Collection of Leaves from Books and Manuscripts Community home page

The core of this collection was a gift in 1950 from Floy K. Hanson in memory of her teacher and mentor Jessie L. Clough. The collection was added to later in the 1950s by Etta Hanson, sister of Miss Floy. The result is this large group of leaves from works ranging from 1121 to 1935 A.D. that were acquired from the Otto F. Ege estate. Otto F. Ege worked for many years at the Cleveland Institute of Art and lectured at the School of Library Science at Case Western Reserve University on the history and the art of the book. He is better known as a biblioclast; removing leaves from books to create portfolios that were distributed worldwide. The Hanson Collection of Leaves from Books and Manuscripts contains two of these portfolios, Original Leaves from Famous Bibles: Nine centuries, 1121-1935 A.D. and Original Leaves from Famous Books: Eight Centuries, 1240 A.D. - 1923 A.D., along with a third collection of leaves not part of a standardized set. Although most leaves originate from religious texts, such as a book of hours, missal, the Qu'ran, or the Bible, others are from secular works, like the leaf from Aristotle's Ethics or Livy's History of Rome.