{"id":5826,"date":"2026-05-27T16:45:20","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T20:45:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.ohio.edu\/library-archives-blog\/?p=5826"},"modified":"2026-05-27T16:45:20","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T20:45:20","slug":"foliophiles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.ohio.edu\/library-archives-blog\/2026\/05\/27\/foliophiles\/","title":{"rendered":"“Sincerely, The Foliophiles Inc.”: Untangling the Pages from the Past Portfolio Sets"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Avery Kumes, Honors Tutorial College Classics & Religious Studies, \u201827,\u00a0Spring 2026 Rare Book intern\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

My name is Avery Kumes and I am a third year Honors Tutorial College Classics & Religious Studies major. I am broadly interested in a public history career, and after a summer experience processing archival records in the East Tennessee History Center<\/a>, I was eager to find more opportunities to do this type of research. I have found myself interested not only in the types of materials an institution holds, but how useful they actually are to people and how can that be improved\u2013as in, are these materials findable? Are they digitized? Are they properly and accurately labeled? My internship in the Mahn Center involved working with a collection of original book leaves (i.e. individual pages removed from incidentally or purposefully unbound and disassembled books and manuscripts) called “Pages from the Past\u201d set I: History of the Written Word<\/em><\/a>, versions of which are housed at multiple institutions including Ohio University. The experience has helped me think about these questions as well as how librarians and archivists bridge the gap between the collections they steward and the public.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ohio University Libraries’ Pages from the Past<\/em> set was compiled and published in May of 1964 by the now-defunct Foliophiles Inc. Foliophiles had been around since the 1920s compiling leaves to make themed sets as teaching aids for libraries and universities. By the 1960s, Foliophiles Inc. was not so much a business as the work of one man, Alfred Stites. Stites\u2019s interesting method-less methods of compiling and describing the contents of these sets has created many snags in our understanding of them, how they were assembled, and where they ended up; untangling these mysteries has been my quite enjoyable but at times Sisyphus-ian task since January.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"This<\/a>
This letter from the Foiliophiles was printed on Pages from the Past indexes. It highlights the different offerings of the company and the uniqueness of their sets. Link to digital item in our collection.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

My Introduction to Pages from the Past <\/h4>\n\n\n\n

I first heard about the Pages from the Past set last fall in my Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology class. Our professor Dr. Cory Crawford told us that there was a collection in the library that contained ancient artifacts, including a Babylonian clay tablet and a Mesopotamian cylinder seal. Dr. Crawford and staff from Archives & Special Collections and Digital Initiatives had worked with Dr. Lawrence Witmer and students at the WitmerLab<\/a> on getting these artifacts imaged with a MicroCT scanner in order to create digital files that could be 3D printed for deeper research and as a teaching aid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Screen<\/a>
Screen capture of the three artifacts in Pages from the Past. The 3D images are available within each item’s record. Link to digital items in our collection.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As a classics major, I was delighted that there were opportunities through the Mahn Center\u2019s internship program to work with older materials and when I applied I requested to work with this collection. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Terminology<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Before I get into what I worked on, I should clarify a few terms. When I refer to a set, I am referring to the collection of materials put together and sold by the Foliophiles Inc. under the name Pages From the Past set I: History of the Written Word<\/em>. These sets began to be assembled in the 1920s as teaching aids for universities and libraries; each contained about 150 items. Instead of purchasing many rare books and manuscripts to show students the diversity and evolution over time of print, script styles, methods of book illustration, etc. (which many institutions could not in any case afford), this company put together themed sets to cover as many time periods and types of texts into one affordable set of leaves. “History of the Written Word” is only one theme, there are several other themed portfolios such as Printed Pages from English Literature<\/a>, Specimens of Woodcuts and Engravings<\/a>, Pages from Religious Works (not held by Ohio University), and more. We can guess, though, that since all these sets were being put together by the same company, that there are leaves shared between portfolios, regardless of theme. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As far as “History of the Written Word,” there are two runs, or groups of releases, of these sets that I have examined. There are believed to be five runs total: the first edition in 1964 (I), two special versions of the first edition compiled in 1964 but not delivered until 1966 (Ia and Ib\u2013one with 159 leaves and one with 96), a second edition in 1965 (II), and a third edition in 1967 (III). Our set is number 14 of 15 from edition I in 1964. There is another fully digitized set from 1964 (I don\u2019t know which version), located at the University of Western Michigan<\/a>. There are also two fully digitized sets from the 1967 run, at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada<\/a> and the University of Missouri<\/a>. Included in each set was a fold-out index listing what was (supposedly) included in the set, numbered in chronological order, with short, one-sentence descriptions. Ours looks like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\n
\"Foldout<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
\"Foldout<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Foldout index included with our Pages from the Past set detailing the contents of the set and information about the Foliophiles. Link to digital items in our collection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each leaf also included a label. Originally, they were mounted on a piece of black cardstock with the label pasted beneath. MUN\u2019s collection is still in its original form, which looks like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Example<\/a>
Example of how leaves came packaged originally-the leaf would\u2019ve been glued to a piece of black cardboard with the informational label pasted below. This is Memorial University of
Newfoundland\u2019s #8 leaf, Registrum Brevium<\/em>, a legal manuscript from 1350. Courtesy of MUN Libraries Archives and Special Collections. Link to digital item in MUN’s collection.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The label descriptions are longer and more detailed than on the indexes, and as far as I can tell, pretty accurate. Usually there will be enough similar details between an index description and a label description to tell if the index is referring to an item actually included in the set, but you cannot always rely on visual similarity. The index descriptions for the medieval manuscript leaves and Persian manuscript leaves provide frustratingly little detail to be sure whether it is the material being described. The only ways to tell would be to read the leaves and thereby deduce whether the subject matter matches the description or to compare scripts, illustrations, substrates, and other technical details, all of which require significant expertise and specialized training. On most of the labels, in the bottom right corner is a copyright date; we assume when the label was printed. This will be important later. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Previous Work on Pages From the Past <\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Much of what I did built off the work of three previous students who worked on this set in 2021 as part of an independent study. They had researched and helped draft a survey asking about the artifacts included in the sets. Drs. Crawford and Intrator then sent the survey to a number of libraries suspected of having a set. The survey results helped me know for sure which libraries had a collection similar to ours. A former intern had also reconciled the index foldout sheet with the leaves we had, showing what was actually included versus what we were supposed to have. These two efforts were the starting point for the work I did, and I would not have been able to check our collection against other institutions had they not done such careful detail work with ours. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also owe a great debt of gratitude to Dr. Arthur Askins, Professor Emeritus of Spanish and Portuguese Literature at University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Askins was fascinated by a particular manuscript leaf from Berkeley\u2019s Pages from the Past collection that was mislabeled as Portuguese, but ended up being from a broken Spanish manuscript that was unknown to historians until Askins examined the text. In an attempt to find other leaves from this manuscript, including the one here at Ohio University<\/a>, Dr. Askins put a lot of time into teasing out the differences between sets, where they were located, and what we can generally expect sets from certain runs to have (he is the one that figured out how many runs of the sets there are). He also got into the weeds of researching Stites\u2019s methods and the origins of the leaves included in the sets. His research, now in the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley<\/a>, has greatly benefited mine.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, to meet Alfred Stites. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Foliophiles Inc. & Alfred Stites <\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Above all, Alfred W. Stites was a businessman, not a book or art historian. Sites created the 1960s sets from a stock of materials purchased from the original Foliophiles Inc., a company started in the 1920s by rare book dealer George M. L. Brown. Brown sold the company name and stock of materials to another man, Harold Maker, in the 1950s, who added additional materials to Brown\u2019s stock, then sold it to Stites in the early 60s. The collection Stites purchased (according to him) consisted of 10,000 leaves, which he used to make sets between 1964-1968. Stites ran Foliophiles for decades though he only produced sets for four years. After moving to Santa Fe in 1969, Stites continued to sell leaves individually and upon his retirement in 2002, sold the rest of the leaves at auction. Since Stites was not trained in rare material handling and selling, there is a lot of mystery surrounding where these materials were acquired from and how he went about putting the sets together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I mentioned earlier, a lot of the manuscript leaves are not described in a way that one could definitively match the index description with a leaf from the collection. Additionally, to my untrained eye, I know as much about the contents of the manuscripts as I\u2019d venture to guess Stites did. We don\u2019t know where Stites got the descriptions of his materials, especially the materials that have 1964, 1965, or 1967 as the copyright date on the label. If Stites kept the 1926\/7 date on the label, it means he was (generally) using Brown\u2019s original words, and it is worth noting that Brown was a rare book dealer by training and likely knew more about these materials than Stites. Any label dated from the 60s was Stites\u2019s description. It would take years of combined effort from many types of experts to untangle these inconsistencies, I have only tried to keep track of these details to help when or if people try to crack these mysteries.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Research Process <\/h4>\n\n\n\n

What it boils down to is that there are so many inconsistencies in what these sets contain that there is only one conclusion we could draw about how they were assembled\u2013that there was no real process. The rule was there was no rule!<\/p>\n\n\n\n