"The Leipzig folios had been bound into one volume in Tischendorf's time, so this binding was undone in 2004."

[Steven Avery]

Digitising the Hand-Written Bible: The Codex Sinaiticus, its History and Modern Presentation (2007)
Ekkehard Henschke
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.601.6836&rep=rep1&type=pdf

The leaves have survived in different conditions. The dry climate in the Sinai desert may have helped to preserve them well for centuries. But the varying hot, cold and humid conditions in Leipzig produced a lot of damage, arising especially from oxidisation of the ink. Because of this, some characters have fallen out of some of the leaves and have thereby caused gaps in the text. The leaves were stored in a walk-in safe with special air-conditioning only after 1998, when the first part of the main library building, which had been in ruins since the end of the Second World War, was reconstructed. Like many other valuable manuscripts and books which were stored in old castles and fortresses during the war, this part of the Codex had suffered from humidity. The Leipzig folios had been bound into one volume in Tischendorf's time, so this binding was undone in 2004. The leaves owned by the British Library are in a better state. But all these different parts of the Codex have to be examined for conservation and preservation purposes.

Ekkehard Henschke, “Digitising the Hand-Written Bible: The Codex Sinaiticus, Its History and Modern Presentation”. Libri 57.1 (2007): 45-51.

 

[Steven Avery]

Help from the Leipzig Library with more accurate information, Ekkehard Henschke has been retired for many years. This is from Ulrich Johannes Schneider and will be tweaked in two weeks, when he is back at the Library. Here are the key two sentences, with two tweaks:

... The bound sheets from Tischendorf's first find in 1844 were indeed unbound in Leipzig early in the 21st century, due to conservation concerns. Since Tischendorf published facsimiles of both portions of the manuscript in 1846 and 1862, those could have been the books he showed around.

That makes a lot of sense. As David asked:

Why would the Royal authorities trust him to walk out, either with St Petersburg's or with the Leipzig sheets and folia from the King of Saxony?

And this would explain why there was no real discussion about the parchment condition in the reports we have of the Royal Society of Literature meeting in London.

However, the Society account does state he brought the Codex:

Tischendorf in London in 1865 - Royal Society of Literature

Tischendorf ducks the English trip

WIP PBF Update Simonides documentation from 1865 to 1890 Journal of Sacred Literature https://books.google.com/books?id=gnstAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA496 "All this time, too, the real test of the genuineness of the Codex Sinaiticus is neglected. The public were assured that in May Tischendorf was to be...

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