About the Cover

How do you read a scrapbook page?Should you begin with text or with image?What does it mean to read across the visual and the verbal?Is it necessary to turn and reorient the book as you read it, or should you move, tilting your head to follow the text as it climbs up the margins?Could a reading begin with a single element of the composition and work outwards?Can you read a pagespread in isolation, or do you need to think about its relationshipinterlocking, fluctuating, developing-to the larger collection of the scrapbook, or indeed of multiple scrapbooks?This sense of fluidity and instability also informs our reading of the medieval manuscript page, demonstrating how reading practices might be shared across medieval and modern 'books.'This issue's cover features a page-spread from a scrapbook made by Edwin Morgan, the Glasgow Laureate, Scottish Makar and poet who began his career as a translator in 1952 with the publication of Beowulf.The University of Glasgow Library and Archives are now the keepers of sixteen scrapbooks made by Morgan between 1931 and 1966.The collection amounts to more than 3600 pages of assemblage, collage, and concrete poetry, which reflects Morgan's voracious interests across his literary career.My decision to introduce Morgan in relation to his translation of Beowulf is significant, as it represents one of the ways I chose to read the scrapbooks when I worked with them as part of a Glasgow Library Fellowship.As I write in my dialogue with E. K. Myerson for this issue, I wanted to think about how the visual process of scrapbooking might have informed the verbal work of translating Beowulf.This became my route through the vast and eclectic visual and verbal data of the scrapbooks.Looking again at the page-spread on this issue's cover, I am drawn to a single early medieval element of the composition: an image of the left-hand end panel of the early-eighth-century Franks Casket, which is also a fragment of a larger whole.The panel depicts Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, being suckled by a she-wolf, while another (perhaps the same) wolf stalks through the woods above.Four men holding spears kneel to observe this scene.Runic carved inscriptions surround the image on all sides and tell the story of Romulus and Remus (British Museum, 2024).This image takes a central position on the righthand page of Morgan's composition and represents the middle of three visual panels arranged by the writer.Could this image of the Franks Casket provide a key to unlocking the whole page-spread?The Franks Casket is a whalebone-carved, lidded box, which depicts scenes from Roman, Germanic, Jewish, and Christian traditions.The casket is also carved with texts in Old English and Latin, which are displayed in both encoded runes and the Latin and Roman alphabets (Webster 2012, 91-7).Like the quotations arranged on Morgan's scrapbook pages, the texts on the Franks Casket also appear in a variety of orientations.Although each of the sides tell a distinct story, the Casket About the Cover