Another photographer, Heini Schneebeli, virtuoso imager of artefacts, is in the studio office at the moment taking pictures of Akan goldweights from my almost embarrassingly large collection. These miniature bronzes (often referred to as Ashanti weights), each an unique lost-wax casting, reveal a whole civilisation in miniature. They show every aspect of human activity from copulation to music making (as in the trumpeters above) and the animal world in all its variety. The abstract weights make a comprehensive inventory of ornament. We are making a book to be published by that guardian angel of almost all my printed work, Hansjörg Mayer, who on our first meeting (in a Corsham pub over forty years ago) announced himself my publisher.

Traders using goldweights 19th C. Photographs: Heini Schneebeli 2007.

CRUMBLING NEWS: a small announcement of a curiosity to come, made topical by my just having painted (if only to postempt another design offered by the publisher) its title page.

For quite a few years now a little South London enterprise has been brewing in which the haunting still-life tableaux of photographer Bruce Rae have provoked appropriately atmospheric poems by Terry Jones. These texts in turn have been worked over (as one might say) by me to provide a further twist of reflection.

Publication now threatens - probably towards the end of the year in a limited edition...

Watch this space.

The current June/July issue of Art in America features TP's extensive article on Hogarth.

Tom Phillips returns to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton this autumn. During his stay an exhibition of new works will open at Flowers New York (October 24th) and the first complete workshop performance of the opera Heart of Darkness by Tarik O'Regan (to libretto and design by TP) will be performed in New York and at the Institute for Advanced Study. Dates and further information to be announced.

Tom Phillips features in a documentary, Concrete, about the The Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive. The film, produced and directed by Sara Sackner takes you on a tour of Ruth and Marvin's remarkable home/museum in Miami which houses the largest private collection of Concrete and Visual Poetry, over 60,000 objects of art, poetry and artist's books including the original pages of A Humument.

View the Trailer

A brief birthday calculation tells me I must get moving again with A Humument. The goal is to revise, edition by edition, the first working of the text as it appears in the first 1980 trade edition (which is itself substantially a reprint of the Tetrad Press limited edition of 1973). With bursts of activity as each edition approaches I have replaced over half the pages with new versions. 163 pages remain to be reworked. Since I announced my intentions in 1980, I have averaged only seven or so pages a year. At that sluggish rate I would have to live to the extremely unlikely age of ninety three with a steady hand and my wits about me to complete the task, so I must get a move on.

All this but a prelude to showing the first page done in my seventies, revisiting the first page of all which started the work in 1966. Here is that early version, appropriately retaining some of the original drawing, seen through a burnt hole in a newly extracted page.

Twenty five years ago Bill Packer, reviewing a show of mine, characterised my attitude to my work saying I was like Little Jack Horner. It upset me at the time but I now see it as a fair observation. It is in that spirit of self congratulation I produce this present plum to show pleasure in demonstrating how great lines of the future (here from Beckett's Worstward Ho) lie latent in Mallock. For the connection with my own work see the lithographic portrait of Samuel Beckett.

Although in the first ten years or so of work on I relied merely on stumbling across names and particularities I eventually got Andy to make, in a little index book, a handwritten concordance; monkish work in those pre-computer days.

It has stood the test of constant use though physically it is now even more battered and ageweary than its user.

But suddenly as an extremely welcome 70th birthday present I have a finely bound, smartly printed, book version thanks to the kind thoughts and diligence of John Pull and the indefatigable Patrick Wildgust.

Thus I've been able when thinking of commemoration, celebration or topical reference to look up a key word like 'seventy'. However I still rely mainly on serendipity, having chanced on 'ted heath' ("who is Ted Heath, mummy?") and 'bush' in my aleatoric trawl. It has offered me no 'blair' of course and (not for that reason alone) I'm glad to see the back of him. Welcome twelve-times-cited Brown!

The Tom Phillips Dante Archive is featured both in the Bodleian Library's 2007 summer exhibition, Italy's Three Crowns: Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio and the accompanying publication of the same name. The exhibition will be open from 19 June to 31 October in the Exhibition Room, Old Schools Quadrangle, Catte Street, Oxford. Admission is free

Dante Rediscovered opens on the 15th August 2007 at Dove Cottage in Grasmere and runs until 18th November 2007. Though largely confined to the 18th and 19th centuries two works by Tom Phillips will be exhibited; a portrait drawing and a copy of the Talfourd Press Inferno. The exhibition will also include works by Blake, Fuseli and Rossetti as well as Byron and Shelley manuscripts.

Three works by Tom Phillips will appear in Eye-Music: Klee, Kandinsky and all that Jazz,

an exhibition about music in art at Pallant House 30 June - 16 September 2007. The exhibition will then tour to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art from 2nd October to 9th December 2007.