For centuries, antique prints, drawings and manuscripts were sliced apart, a standard practice that created individual pieces of vellum and paper for sale or display, in the hopes of drawing attention to the art forms. Institutions are now trying to reassemble the dispersed pages and fragments.

Last month, Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library acquired medieval works — books, loose pages and bindings — from descendants of Otto F. Ege, a dean at the Cleveland Institute of Art who died in 1951.