The Heart of a Humument

Stuttgart: Edition Hansjörg Mayer, 1985. Unique copy of this near-miniature iteration of A Humument, the decades-long altered book project by English artist Tom Phillips (1937-2022), purchased by Phillips from the unknown competition binder who executed its striking design binding. In 1966, Phillips picked up an obscure Victorian novel by W.H. Mallock, A Human Document, at a secondhand furniture shop in Peckham. Over the course of his long career, Phillips physically and conceptually transformed the pages of Mallock’s book into an evolving livre d’artiste exploring themes of memory, dreams, and heartbreak. Inspired by William S. Burroughs’s “cut-up” technique, (truncated) Phillips manually reworked the existing text, creating “A Humument” out of “Human” and “Document.” He erased, collaged, and overpainted Mallock’s pages, adding images to produce new nonlinear narratives: “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.” Originally published in parts between 1971 and 1973, A Humument would be reworked and reprinted by Phillips, in both limited and trade editions, for the following fifty years. The project would ultimately be recognized as one of the most important postmodern artist’s books, and would inspire a series of creative iterations, including a Humument app developed for Apple platforms. In 1984, at his Talfourd Press, Phillips published The Heart of A Humument, a compact pocket edition that isolates the central 2½ x 2-inch portion of A Humument’s pages, visually focusing on the “heart” of his altered text; the book would be reissued the following year in this trade edition by Hansjörg Mayer. Sized to fit the human hand, barely larger than a pack of cigarettes, this iteration invites the reader to engage with Phillips’s ambitious artist’s book in a more intimate way. The small scale of The Heart of A Humument made it a natural choice of subject for a bookbinding competition. Notes from Tom Phillips’s estate indicate that this copy of The Heart of A Humument was bound by an unknown competition binder; it was purchased directly by Phillips from that binder for his own library around 1988. A fine copy, direct from the studio of Tom Phillips. Single volume, measuring 4 x 3 inches: [8], [144], [8]. Design binding of full turquoise-green morocco, title gilt-stamped to upper board within repeating rows of “TOM PHILLIPS” stamped in black, lower board with treatment reversed, spine with gilt-stamped “O” within repeating columns spelling “TOM PHILLIPS.” Endpapers of textured woven voile cloth over printed text, all edges stained burgundy. Binding unsigned. Color illustrations on every page. Housed in a custom clamshell box. (Inventory #: 1004088)