Customer Reviews

A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, Revised Edition

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I own multiple copies and give them away to worthy friends. Visually, artistically, and intellectually stunning, this masterpiece is unique in the world of art/literature. The author/artist Tom Phillips began this work in the 1960s, and first published it in book form in the 1980s. He called the result of his decades of effort The Humument and it is a completely illustrated version of W. H. Mallock's 19th Century novel A Human Document. Each page is a well conceived and compelling work of art. On each page the author leaves only a few of the original words revealed. These surviving phrases tell, in prose and poetry, the pathetic love story of Bill Toge. Symbiotically linked to the art itself, the preserved text, and its tale of Toge, reveal a story Phillips found submerged within the original text, a story which Mallock neither wrote nor intended. Phillips calls his work `mining for meaning'. Everyone who has received this book from me has had great difficulty putting it down until they had read/absorbed/experienced/lived/studied it from cover to cover. If there is such a thing as a priceless book, The Humument would be a good candidate for the category.

I expected this to be arty rubbish, but I was greatly surprised. It's a unique and strangely beautiful experience -- and not only that, but the picture-per-page structure makes it ideal to dip into during spare moments. Whether it actually has any deep meaning is open to debate, but each page has something on it to provoke thought. I love this thing.

Incredible treatment of a victorian novel using techniques of modern illumination to create a autobiographical love story. All written from within the context of an existing novel. Great graphics by one of England's best living artists. Surely unlike any other piece of literature you'll buy this year. See the Tom Phillips web page.

I received this book as a gift about 10 years ago and have yet to tire of it. It is beautiful and funny, surreal, creepy and profound.

I love this book. I first learnt of Tom Phillips when he recently did the cover of an album by a band called Dark Star, and then was introduced to his work whilst on work experience last summer. I hunted down a copy of this book, and then devoured it completely. at times moving, at times funny, and all the time completely incredible to just look and marvel at. the art work is great. ingenuitive, original and inspired. this book seems to be getting harder and harder to find... buy one while you can.

Truly an elegant, messy piece of work.
Tom Phillips' Humument is one of the most affecting marriages of image and text that I have viewed/read. Visaully, it is stunning, with its layers of subsumed text and inventive imagery. Moments of profundity bordering on Zen surface intermittently, whilst bawdy puns [...] up beside.
If you're looking for sustained, easily interpreted narrative, then this book simply is not for you. If, on the other hand, you long for a story that is as much in your head/heart, as on the page, I can heartily recommend A Humument.

I had been introduced to this book years ago by one of my peers. I had always remembered it, but never really had a need to buy it. I had decided this year to have my high school art students create altered books, and I knew it was time to get it so they had some visual references of how you can transform book pages. I am so glad I bought the book. You don't need to read it as a book, although you can. Every time I open it, I find a new treasure. It's just amazing what Phillips has created from an old book. It's an inspiration and a great piece of artwork.

As a poet and artist, I am interested in the automatic art practiced here, and it's ability to reveal the unconscious issues of importance in our lives. The work hails Burroughs' and his method of drawing poetry from the chaotic texts around him. Unlike Boroughs, Phillips has used an entire novel, and some of its original author's shortcomings, and indeed the shortcomings of the genre from which it is drawn, to make individual points about the artist's current world, some one hundred years later. The book can be "read" sequentially or individual pages shown as moments of art, from an amber necklace that displays an entire life. (To borrow a phrase from Vonnegut.) I'm also interested in his method. According to the author's notes, he drew this book at random, using the first book that he could afford with his current pocket change. (Amounting I believe to about two dollars,) and then he treated the pages within. This incorporation of the everyday, and the use of simple inks has enabled a spare time, relatively inexpensive project to become a work of art relating the human condition in a manner simular to life itself, incorporating the one page at a time method of daily life, that amounts to a beautiful work. Truly the art of the proletariat, not some etherial "l'art por l'art" that can only be experienced or appreciated by the upper class. Phillips states in his intro that he has yet to find a work of such depth and vocabulary to apply other new treatments, but for those aspiring artists wishing to emulate him, I have an excellent choice, an underappreciated, yet highly available novel of the Harlem Rennaisance, Della Larsen's "Quicksand," which covers several worlds of angst and incorporates a panopoly of words.

Tom Phillips' A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel is a unique work-in-progress focused on the idea that one can create art out of found texts. Certainly Phillips' illustrations help support this impression, providing texture and layers of symbolism to a text that might otherwise come across as too minimalist to convey meaning to its readers. In this sense it is more of a visual art book than a treated novel, as I found myself admiring the abstract pictures more than the spare words of text. These added a flavor to the pictures and apparently told a love story, though I did not find a narrative in there myself.

The idea of "treating" an extant work to produce a minimalist, nebulous narrative is an appealing study in our subconscious, if nothing else. Human beings have a seemingly endless fascination with riddles, an ability to read profound meaning into even the most vague phrases. It is perhaps a test of creativity: what you get out of the text is what you bring to it. Personally I got a little impatient with the whole thing, but it should be some people's cup of frothy chai.