Introduction
 We who work here at Mortons Media Group are fortunate to have access to what, in my motorcycle-biased opinion, is probably the best archive in the world.
As an enthusiast first and foremost, I feel overwhelmingly privileged to have the opportunity to delve into this fabulous resource at will. But, to my endless frustration, it has proved difficult to try and find a way to share it with fellow motorcyclists. As editor of The Classic MotorCycle, I make a conscious effort to try and use archive pictures as and when I can but still, thousands remain unseen. This is where the germination for the idea of The Scrapbook Series came from. My intention is to open up the archive for others to see just some of the images we have. I have not attempted to do anything complicated or clever – though the scrapbook is split into time period sections, that is as far as we’ve gone in ‘organising’ things. We’ve even left the images in their raw untouched form, complete with periodmarkings.
We could have gone for a chronological order; we could have written plenty more words, but what we are trying to capture is something of the appeal of physically looking in the myriad boxes of pictures we have here. One never quite knows exactly what is where and what will be found. That is the thinking behind the way the publication has been put together.
The other inspiration was that, as a motorcycle-mad child, I’d keep bits out of the weekly paper or the monthlies in a big folder, cut out and stuck in. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in doing that; hopefully, this ‘scrapbook’ has something of that appeal too. Having decided on the process and form we wanted to take with this series, it was now a case of ‘where to start?’ To me, Triumph seemed an obvious starting point. The Triumph name is one of the most enduringly popular names in motorcycling. It is an evocative title, one that conjures up all sorts of powerful imagery while the word itself – triumph – literally means to win.
What a great name with which to christen your product. Triumph the motorcycle maker has for the most part in its 100-plus years been a success story; a triumph, in fact. The idea of this tome is to celebrate, through a selection of images, that success story. Hopefully, this Triumph edition will be the precursor to variations – we’ve already BSA and Norton planned – and the depth of the archive means that there’s more scope for another Triumph one (or two, or maybe three…), should the demand be there. It’s all about trying to enable what’s been, largely, hidden in boxes for years, to be seen.
We hope you enjoy what we’ve selected.
James Robinson, Editor
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The Scrapbook series : Triumph
