Welcome to Litsy!

(Part 2)

Many themes emerge, those of the nature of art, repurposing, love, death, illness, despair, bliss and many more. Philips has created intricate and important images on each page which reflect, mirror and encapsulate the chosen words on the page. It reads almost like a hybrid book; a poetic novel and is challenging but breath-taking.

(Part 1)

A Humument is the work of a decades long creative endeavour by Tom Philips which started as a simple challenge to himself in 1966: to find a second-hand book for threepence and alter every page. From this came several different versions and from the pages of an old Victorian novel called A Human Document, a new story emerged. Philips‘ new book follows the story of a man called Bill Toge and his love Irma.

Just finished this weird and wonderful book. It was a necessarily slow read and anything but straight forward. You have to be willing to give yourself over to surrealism and the real work of making sense of collage ... Something like a story slowly emerges from fragments of text and illustration. Art, sex, and the human struggle with both... What more could you want?

This book continues to amaze me. This page: "his wife; / he took / her extra ticket / to the Ring / her huge carving / of splendid / sound / he emerged from / the Opera / that / huge engine of torture"

Just started this gorgeous book a friend gave me this summer. It's a "treated novel" .. . Art on top of pages, little traces of the original story showing through, selected to tell a new story.