A Humument

First published in 1970 followed by four revised editions in 1986, 1998, 2004 and 2012, "A Humument" by Tom Phillips is definitely one of the most unique paperbacks ever created. Why? Because this story has been hand picked by Phillips from an existing late 1800s novel by W H Mallock - "A Human Document" - by quite literally choosing his words from the pages to produce a new tale.

I first came across this book in my final year at college while studying Fine Art. Before this class I had never heard of altering books, or existing examples but I was completely infatuated by this piece of art the second I was introduced to it.

Phillips began by penciling around certain words on each page to create new sentences and began forming a new story. As he worked on this novel he began to use a range of Fine Art techniques including drawing, painting and collaging to cover the words he had discarded from the original novel. Once finished, the final story centered around a character called Bill Toge, who only appeared on pages where the words "together" or "althogether" occurred.

 When asked about his product, Phillips replied "It is a forgotten Victorian novel found by chance...plundered, mined, and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems and replaced the text [he'd] stripped away with visual images of all kinds."I think I find the idea of creating altered books so appealing because sometimes I struggle to create something from a blank piece of paper; the beauty about altered books is that somebody has already used their imagination to write the novel that you can then use as inspiration for your own art. There are many ways to alter a book to create both 2D and 3D pieces and during my Fine Art course I created both. However, I definitely preferred using the book as a sketchbook, and picking out certain words to create new sentences that I could then use as the basis of my artwork. I love to collage and use different mediums in layers to create busy, abstract pieces and I think this kind of art matches perfectly with the nature of altered books and picking out words to create new sentences that don't always make perfect sense. At the time I created my own altered book by creating a new sentence from the words on a chosen double page spread, and then used the discarded words as the canvas on which I would visualise the sentence. However, because this was the first time I had ever produced an altered book I took each double spread as they came and the finished book ended up being a compilation of different themes depending on the words I had chosen on each of the spreads. In the future I would like to try creating another altered book that is more influenced by "A Humument" by attempting to build a new story from the existing that flows through the pages and keeps a consistent theme.