folios

Evidence

"dealers carved up albums and manuscripts (sometimes while they were still in museum collections) and split folios in order to produce two leaves out of one and thus maximise profits."

Remarks

The author describes a destructive profit-maximizing technique used by art dealers such as George Demotte, where single folios of medieval manuscripts were physically split to create two separate leaves (p. 33). This practice effectively 'dismantled' artifacts like the Great Mongol Shāhnāma and separated the 'constituent arts of the book' (p. 33).