A Humument
A Treated Victorian Novel
Tom Phillips
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| ‘Kaleidoscopically inventive … remarkable and inspired … its staggering visual and textual inventiveness means that it has some claim to be the Ulysses of art books’ | | – The Guardian |
| "Sly, humorous, erotic and endlessly fascinating' | – Edward Lucie-Smith
The Sunday Times |
‘An art book of almost mythical significance … each page sublimely embellished …
a creation that is something rich and strange’ | | – Scotland on Sunday |
In the mid-1960s, Tom Phillips took a forgotten nineteenth-century novel, W.H. Mallock's A Human Document, and began working over the extant text to create something new. The artist writes,
I plundered, mined and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents and surrealist catastrophes which seemed to lurk within its wall of words. As I worked on it, I replaced the text I'd stripped away with visual images of all kinds. I began to tell and depict, among other memories, dreams and reflections, the sad story of Bill Toge, one of love's casualties.'
After its first publication in 1980, A Humument rapidly became a cult classic. This new fourth edition follows its predecessors by incorporating revisions and re-workings – over half the pages in the 1980 edition are replaced by new versions – and celebrates an artistic enterprise that is nearly forty years old and still actively a work in progress.
For more information see Humument.com
Tom Phillips' past and current work are featured on his own website
Also of interest:
The Postcard Century by Tom Phillips
Tom Phillips: Works and Texts |
|  |  | | | | Fourth edition | | ISBN 0500285519 | | ISBN-13 978-0500285510 | | | | 17.5 x 12.5 cm | | Paperback with flaps | | 384pp | | 368 illustrations, 368 in colour | | First published 2005 | | | | £16.95 | | | |  | | | | 
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