- Paperback: 384 pages
- Publisher: Thames & Hudson; 4 edition (4 April 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0500285519
- ISBN-13: 978-0500285510
- Product Dimensions: 17.6 x 12.8 x 3.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 340,398 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Review
Weird yet compelling ... brilliant and readable'
--The Week
--The Week
Product Description
In the mid-1960s, Tom Phillips took a forgotten nineteenth-century novel, W. H. Mallock's A Human Document, and began cutting and pasting the extant text to create something new. The artist writes, 'I plundered, mined and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents and surrealist catastrophes which seemed to lurk within its wall of words. As I worked on it, I replaced the text I'd stripped away with visual images of all kinds. I began to tell and depict, among other memories, dreams and reflections, the sad story of Bill Toge, one of love's casualties.' After its first publication in book form in 1980, A Humument rapidly became a cult classic. This new fourth edition follows its predecessors by incorporating revisions and re-workings -- over half the pages in the 1980 edition are replaced by new versions -- and celebrates an artistic enterprise that is nearly forty years old and still actively a work in progress.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Every page a wonderfully witty surrealist delight,
By chrisaliz@ukgateway.net (Braunton, North Devon) - See all my reviews
This review is from: A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel (Paperback)
I wish I had found Tom Phillips' book sooner.Its title neatly describes what, verbally, he has done. He has dug into the text on each page of an extant Victorian novel, "A Human Document", sometimes obliterating all but the fragments he wants us to read, sometimes allowing us to make out more or less clearly their original context, in order to create a much odder narrative. On each page, the new texts are hilarious, surreal, poetic, quite often even absurdly and astonishingly moving, and, though the thread of a new tale emerges, these pages each have a life of their own. A new hero is created in the reshaping of the text: Bill Toge, his surname lifted from the word "together". As he moves through dooms of love, he encounters other characters, some of whom swim up to the new surface from the sunken original novel. But this is only the half of it: every page is also a little work of art, a visual treasure in its own right. Integrated with the work Phillips perfoms upon the text, are cross-hatchings, rich, delightful colour washes, subversively referential images and odd, sometimes comic and sugestive shapes. For all the joyous editing of the Victorian story, this is not a short book and one of its amazing strengths is its power, page by page, to find ways of sustaining its capacity to surprise and delight, verbally and visually. It will not wear out after one read, like so many essays into the comic in bound form. This is for everyone with a love of word-play, of poetry, of considered wit, and of the visually rich.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing is an understatement,
By
This review is from: A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel (Paperback)
What an incredible adventure of an art-piece - every page is different, exciting and inspiring
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I love this artist!,
By
This review is from: A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel (Paperback)
Tom Phillips is one of my favourite artists, and his work is really quite beautiful. His altered text is an inspiration to anyone.
I saw this book almost ten years ago, so I'm not sure if this is a different version or re-printed, as I know he made many volumes. His poetry is brilliant because it has been formed from somebody else's words, which to me makes it even more sophisticated. Don't worry though, this is abstract, sad and understandable poetry!! This book inspires me in my own work, and in my teaching. I think more students should explore this book. Its handy little size means it can fit anywhere, and be read anytime! As far as I can remember, this book arrived very quickly, but even if it didn't, it would be worth the wait.
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