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 page-spread in isolation, or do you need to think about its relationship—interlocking, 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’.