A Humument

I came by my copy of this unique work through a series of synchronistic connections. It started with one of those Amazon.com recommendations that keep popping up when you're not in the least bit interested, you know: 'customers who bought this item also bought this other one'.
Last year two quite different parties at different times had told me I should check out Danielewski's House of Leaves, so in due course, having failed to cross paths with it in my day to day perambulations, I got around to looking for it on Amazon, and found: 'Customers who bought House of Leaves also bought Fate of the Artist by Eddie Campbell'. Well, I don't know how that mechanism works, but it did seem to me that the gods were slipping me a message. So, shortly afterwards when Hayley Campbell told me to get a hold of Woman's World by Graham Rawle and the Amazon machine paired it with A Humument, I was paying attention to the signs and I picked up that one too. I hasten to add that I have gone back to dismissing the recommendations, and Fate has gone back to being paired with assorted graphic novels, but meanwhile the two books arrived together, and I have already talked about Woman's World here.

A Humument by Tom Phillips is a 'treatment' of a copy of the 1892 novel, A Human Document by one WH Mallock, presumably selected mostly for its anonymity. Phillips has taken each printed page of the original and converted it to his own purposes. The process begins with the selection of words and phrases from the text on the page to arrive at a new text. The resulting new text is by turns poetic:
'the cakes and cream and- pleasures of life, and- butterflies-and her lips- her voice-and- words broken- And- my real- you'
and ribald:
'The Princess with effusion held out a wrinkled- pologe- Grenville - scanned the sofa- to see- Miss Markham,- raising her- dress- half parted'

Phillips achieves this construction of new texts first by lassoing the word or phrase and then connecting it to the next by an umbilical cord, making a channel between words and lines using the white of the page. Then the unwanted parts are pictorially obscured. I said lasso there to avoid using the term 'word balloon' which I'd automatically use in another context, because there are places where Phillips wishes to allude specifically to that context as in his page 266, where he has found an amusing satirical text:
'bush- remember- bush- bush- remember that bitter name- remember him- that rude-stare-at- destiny'
The pictorial content of this page uses collaged images from American romance comic books. Elsewhere, painterly qualities prevail in a patient accumulation of both the abstract and representational.

A Humument is a continually ongoing project for Phillips. Since treating that first copy of Mallock's book he has obtained other copies and started in again. An example of how he extracts two different texts from the same printed page may be seen by comparing the covers of the third and fourth (current) editions, which I've shown here.
The third reads:
'my poor little book- very rich for- eyes"
Using the same Mallock page as the base, in the fourth edition it becomes:
'as I come to- change half- my-little book- airy stories- journey- on---my-friend of-time- till very rich.'

You can find the earliest edition from the'70s online, (many of pages of which have survived into the latest edition), though the version at Rosacordis seems to be missing the large view option at the moment. Phillips' own site may supply that. At the beginning the artist's technique owed more to simple pen and ink. With time he came to use quite elaborate pictorial devices, and gouache paint, going so far as to recently include collage as mentioned above. You can see some of the more fully worked pages by altering the numericals in this url between 02 and 10
06 is an attractive self-portrait in gouache. The author introduces himself on page fifty, at fifty years of age::
'Play- the shadow of- fifty years- imagine only- a century- at last welcome- my own- my self I'
This page has been considerably altered since that version, as you can see in the most recent edition.

A Humument is usually described as an 'artist's book', a medium which perhaps begins with Max Ernst's collage novels. And within that medium the idea of altering earlier texts is not unique; there are some examples here (the 'Altered Page' exhibition) including somebody's 'treatment' of the Yellow Pages. A Humument has its own particular relationship to narrative. To begin with, the characters of the original novel exist as marine life beneath the typographical surface, their movements occasionally catching the light by way of a name selected by Phillips for his new texts. But there is more than that. Phillips contrives to create an entirely new character whose existence is not even hinted in the original. This is Bill Toge (his surname formed from the four-letter sequence found only in 'together' and 'altogether'), a casualty of love stumbling through the book.
'The shyness of -toge- he looked- under - her dress- -anemones arrested- him--- and a woman's well poised eagerness"
and:
'toge- accepted his -thrown value--and recognized yesterday- had to laugh'.
This, the underlying source text and a small assortment of visual cues, such as a window that Toge is usually sitting near to, even though there is no cartoonist's continuity about what Toge is suppose to look like, just a few typographical rules that hold him 'together', bind the 366 pages of the 'novel' into a singular reading experience. By the end of it, Toge and his neuroses are real enough. (Phillips once said that when he arrives in a new town he tends to check the phone book in the vague expectation of finding a real Bill Toge.)

Another relevant link: Exhibition of prints by Tom Phillips including some Humument variations.

For me one of the precious things about A Humument is that it is another example of the exciting developments in the world of The Book that I have written of here already, and of which Woman's World and House of Leaves etc. are also examples. It is occurring in the blurred areas between things. Phillips took a cheap printed novel and made it into an artist's book, foregrounding the aesthetics of painterly surface and of poetry. But in reintroducing narrative and character and incident, however loosely, he has gone halfway to reconverting it back into a novel, a different novel. A different kind of novel altogether, with pictures. For its daring in just existing, this book wins my respect, but for its sense of HUMour and its sense of the HUMan I will be keeping on my shelf as long as I have a shelf.
'go into the world toge- sing our times and seasons,- sing of childhood,- twilight- swing- toge- in the- opera- they- forgot'