Barney Rosenthal, by Ian Jackson

Many readers of this blog will have known, or at least known of, Bernard ("Barney") Rosenthal, who died at the beginning of the year. There are online obituaries by John Schilman here and by Ian Jackson here (also here).

A Third New Cutting Illuminated by the Master of the Brussels Initials

Trawling images on my hard drive this week for something completely different I came across another cutting, apparently unpublished, apparently from the same Gradual as the ones in a recent post, now at the Detroit Institute of Arts:

[source]

Louise Ege, Book-Breaker

After Otto Ege's early death in 1951, his widow Louise inherited his estate, of which much of the value was his collection of medieval manuscript leaves. At the time of his death he had apparently done all the groundwork to prepare the portfolios of "Fifty Original Leaves", but did not live long enough to start marketing and selling them. In a previous post I looked at an example of Louise's attempts to market portfolios after his death.

It is usually assumed or implied that she sold leaves from books that he had already broken up, and that her role after his death was simply to try to recover the money that he had invested in the collection, but I have recently identified an example of a book that she apparently bought and broke herself.