A humument

by Phillips, Tom

"After its first publication in book form in 1980, A Humument rapidly became a cult classic. This edition follows its predecessors by incorporating revisions and re-workings: a hundred pages are replaced by new versions. As well as marking Tom Phillips's sixtieth birthday year, it celebrates an enterprise which is now itself thirty years old and still actively a work in progress." "In a unique fiction, word and image are blended with a richness scarcely seen since Blake. The artist writes, "I took a forgotten Victorian novel found by chance. 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. It began to tell and depict, amongst other memories, dreams and reflections, the sad story of Bill Toge, one of love's casualties." "Within this small forma