Paper splitting has been known since the nineteenth century. Initially, it was used by restorers to separate recto and verso of double-sided prints or drawings. Today, paper splitting is employed for the strengthening of weakened paper. Two German conservation centers committed to splitting for more than 30 years are chiefly responsible for the development of the process to its current level of sophistication. Günter Müller at the Thuringian University and State Library at Jena perfected manual paper splitting. Over the same time period, Wolfgang Wächter, now at the Zentrum für Bucherhaltung in Leipzig, developed the paper-splitting machine. The contemporary process is described from first-hand observations and interviews with the conservators at Jena and Leipzig. Technical evaluations are identified. Observations are made on several seventeenth-century book pages and a nineteenth-century newspaper page that were split for the author.