A new page of A Humument marks the death in November of Marvin Sackner. The major patron of my book and with his wife Ruth, an early dedicatee.

Marvin's daughter Sara emailed me the day after and invited me to join in a funerary zoom, which I felt should be a family occasion as with a touching address from the rabbi it proved to be as I saw in the video later. Yet I did make a guest appearance via the showing and reading of some well chosen pages from A Humument: a surprise and a moving honour.

Luckily the bulk of the Sackner collection had recently been acquired by the University of Iowa whose chief archivist Margaret Gamm soon contacted me to ask if I could write a note on my long relationship with the Sackners. This accompanies a picture of the signature work I made for their Miami home and describes how they met my work and I them, the beginning of a warm friendship for almost half a century.

 Homage to John Cage, archival print with silkscreen. Edition of 25, 55 x 59 cm

Determined that its unbroken record of 252 Summer Exhibitions must not be curtailed by Covid 19, the Royal Academy of Arts has opened it’s doors again to the Summer in Winter 2020 Summer Exhibition which features 5 new prints by Tom Phillips. The academy is open daily from 10am to 6pm but booking in advance is essential even for members. For those of you unable to visit you can still browse and buy online at the Summer Exhibition Explorer website until 3rd January 2021.

Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, the fictional autobiography of a hapless anti-hero, subverted the rules of novel-writing very early in the history of the genre, using all the devices at the disposal of contemporary book production – missing sections, blacked-out pages, proliferations of glyphs such as asterisks and dashes – as well as bespoke visual emebllishments in the text (in one famous example, an intricate swash indicating the way a character flourishes his stick in the air).

Wishing to produce a sumptuous volume such as Sterne intended for his tale, The Folio Society have recently commissioned Tom Phillips to design and illustrate their new edition of this inventive novel : with his long experience of processing books to enhance text with stylish and witty visualisations, the artist is uniquely well placed to carry out the task and has produced what the Society calls "the perfect pictorial counterpart to Laurence Sterne’s comic masterpiece".

For further details or to purchase a copy, vist the Folio Society's online shop.