A Humument
A Humument was begun in 1966 when Tom Phillips set himself a task: to find a second-hand book for threepence and alter every page by painting, collage and cut-up techniques to create an entirely new version.
The book he found was an 1892 Victorian obscurity A Human Document by W.H. Mallock and Phillips transformed it into A Humument. The first version was printed by the Tetrad press in 1973, and in 1980 The first bound trade edition was produced by Hansjörg Mayer in Stuttgart and distributed by Thames & Hudson, with 15 new versions of pages since the Tetrad Press edition. Phillips continued to transform and develop the work, with revised versions of pages added to each new Thames and Hudson edition. In 2016 the sixth edition was published, in which every single page had been revised since the first version. The cover claimed this to be the “Final Version”.
By 2018 Phillips had returned to the project and had at the time of his death in 2022 already created 78 pages of a third version, as yet unpublished.
This section of the website brings together a wealth of information on this Gesamtkunstwerk which you are invited to explore by clicking the links on the left of this page. Listen to the artist-author reading the whole of the sixth edition of A Humument in the player below.