Artist’s Books
Sample pages from A Humument
Tom Phillips’ A Humument is an example of an altered book, a type of artist’s book where an existing volume is modified in some way to create a new work. In this case, the existing work was W. H. Mallock’s late Victorian novel, A Human Document, a copy of which was acquired by Phillips in 1966. By obscuring parts of the original text, highlighting certain words and adding visual imagery to the pages Phillips has created a new narrative out of the original.
Although each page exists as an original, over the years, various pages have been reproduced in limited editions and in 1980 an edition of A Humument was published by Thames and Hudson. Over the years Phillips has continued to rework pages of the book, with subsequent editions being published in 1987 and 1997. The later editions vary from the first edition, both visually and textually, as individual pages have been replaced with later versions.
The illustrations below show example pages from the first edition (1980) and the second revised edition (1997) to illustrate how the book has evolved.
First edition (1980)
Second edition (1997)
Images ©Tom Phillips, used with permission
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