In this blog post we are delighted to hear from our colleague Andy from the cataloguing department of the Library. He was recently working on ‘A Humument: a treated Victorian novel’. What’s a ‘humument’? read on to find out!
The artist Tom Phillips sadly died in November at the age of 85. He had a long and varied career, encompassing work as a painter, printmaker, collagist, composer and librettist. Perhaps surprisingly, his most enduring achievement is a book: A Humument was a fifty-year project which involved almost completely remaking a Victorian novel, namely A Human Document by William Hurrell Mallock. Inspired in part by the cut-up poems of William Burroughs, Phillips took Mallock’s book (which he had purchased at random for threepence in an antiques shop in 1966) and began scoring passages out in pen and ink, with the aim of creating a new narrative from the portions of unredacted text. This simple method was later surpassed as Phillips began employing more visual techniques, such as drawing, painting and collaging over the pages. Gradually, portions of text on each page of the book were creatively defaced, with the remaining unaltered text forming a new ‘found’ story, accompanied throughout by hundreds of unique and colourful artworks.
Phillips repeated the process several times throughout his career. Six trade editions of A Humument were published (plus various other limited editions) between 1970 and 2016, each giving a completely new reading experience centred around Phillip’s invented protaganist, Toge (whose name can only appear on pages that originally contained the words ‘together’ or ‘altogether’).
The Library holds two copies of the second revised edition, published by Thames and Hudson in 1997. One copy is available to borrow from the main library (available at D 700.924 PHI). The other is held in Archives & Special Collections, and is part of a limited edition of 150 copies, which includes an original artist’s plate hand coloured and signed by Phillips. Please contact us if you’d like to view this copy in the Reading Room.
Further reading:
Mallock, W. H., A human document. New ed. New York: Cassell publishing company, 1892. Available from HathiTrust.
Tom Phillips : Works and texts. London: Thames and Hudson, 1992. Available in the main library D 759.2 PHI/T
‘Doctoring Victorian Literature – A Humument: An Interview With Tom Phillips’ in Partington, G., & Smyth, A., Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary (New Directions in Book History). London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. eBook available via SUPrimo
