Tom Phillips - HUMan docUMENT: I plundered, mined and undermined original 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

Tom Phillips, Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel , Thames & Hudson, 2005 [1970.]

"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."

A visual adventure, a peculiar space where the reader-spectator is invited to speculate on the meaning of words and images. - ARTnews

A wonderful entertainment...full of humor, visual invention, and the peculiar poignancy of unnoticed meanings. - San Francisco Chronicle

It may be the closest a paperback book has come to being an art object. - New York

One of the more winning and witty artistic experiments of recent times. - Washington Post

"I hope you'll try it for yourself. Just find an old book... any topic will do. Then visually scan the pages and look for words you can link together to form a whole new story or a clever poem.

Sometimes it's simple and sometimes it's more challenging. Sometimes the poetry is very naughty and suggestive. Sometimes it's just silly! Whatever happens, it sure is a great new way to play with art.

I have used the following mediums and have had fabulous success: Paint, gesso, gel medium, coloured pencils, pen and ink, crayons, permanent markers, watercolours, collage, embossing powders, rubber stamps, image transfers.... the sky's the limit!!!

A humument adds new dimension to an altered book!" - earmark-decorative-painting-studio

"For nearly twenty years, I have collected the artistic, literary, and musical works of Tom Phillips, whom I have known as a friend and as his patron. To express succinctly my appreciation and description of his work, I utilise the word "Humumentism," one that I coined from Phillips's seminal, visual-poetic artist's book, A Humument. Although it might appear brash to ascribe an art form to an individual rather than a group of artists, I feel pressed to do so on several counts, not least because his multi-leveled creative accomplishments so discomfort the critical sector that interprets them. Phillips has always worked in parallel styles and themes, in sharp contrast to most successful artists, whose art is easily identified by a single style of the moment with changes, if ever, progressing serially over time. Human beings generally feel more at ease with an artist who has a single style and are put off by having to adjust to an artist whose style, thematic material, and medium all abruptly change.

For those unfamiliar with the works of Phillips, a first viewing of a large body of his work in which disparate styles and themes appear side by side might bring about a sense of cacophony or awe. But if the effort is taken to delve into Phillips's oeuvre, then each of these styles and themes can be demonstrated to have a long-standing lineage in time. One does not need to become an art detective to enjoy Phillips's work; rather, his individual works can be visually and intellectually enjoyed if the viewer does not attempt to place the whole in the context of a single art movement. Herein lies the foundation for a partial description of "Humumentism": artistic creativity carried out in parallel styles and themes outside the popular conception of serial artistic presentations.
Our first encounter with Phillips's work took place at his 1975 retrospective exhibition held at the Kunsthalle in Basel. On a summer vacation trip to Switzerland, Ruth and I visited the Kunsthalle as an art-related vacation activity. We did not go there especially to see the Phillips exhibition, which featured works by an artist barely known to us. At first, we wondered whether Tom Phillips was an artist or a group of artists. But as we looked at the pictures more closely, we saw wonderful clusters of artistic styles bound to each other. We experienced an epiphany that has not been repeated in our artistic adventures: we recognised the unique artistic inventiveness of work encompassing all of contemporary and modern art history. This was evidenced by images representing visual poetry, abstract expressionism, constructivism, visual/verbal art, expressionistic portraits, pointillism, color stripes and calligraphic markings, among others. All of them touched favorably upon our personal aesthetic. We stayed several hours at the exhibition and returned the next day for several more.
For us the highlight of the exhibition were the pages of A Humument, an artistically treated 1892 Victorian novel by W.H. Mallock, A Human Document, displayed between two large panes of glass to enable recto-verso viewing and reading. This work imparted a profound delightful, visual and intellectual experience, and day-dreams about owning this work, which was well beyond our financial reach (the sale price was listed at the information desk of the Kunsthalle). We resolved to collect prints made by Phillips which we could afford and to meet this future star of our collection. Subsequently, on this same trip, we made our first purchase of Phillips, Ein Deutsches Requiem, After Brahms, a suite of prints, and A Humument as a series of prints. The next year we met Tom, later purchased the original pages of A Humument, and have continued acquiring revised pages as well as paintings, drawings, objects, books and prints.
I consider A Humument to be the most important artist's book of the twentieth century. It constitutes the basis for my definition of Phillips's work as "Humumentism". Phillips's artistic treatment of this book, in which each page has been painted, typed upon, drawn, or collaged to leave clusters of the original printed text as new poetry, is epitomised by the new poetry Phillips culled from the printed text of the first page. "The following sing I a book, a book of art, of mind art, and that which he did, reveal I." Fragments of Humument texts remain a prominent stylistic feature of Phillips's paintings and drawings to the present, including his illustrations for Dante.
Although Phillips leaves the impression that his selection of Mallock's novel was fortuitous, I believe its choice was deliberate, either as a conscious or subconscious decision on his part. For example, the story begins with the reading of an imaginary journal in manuscript, reminiscent of the imaginary tack taken by Phillips in producing A Humument. The title of the novel is relevant to Phillips's work. It recalls the idea of Humanism, which the German philosopher Schiller emphasised as the idea of creative individual thought forming the basis of personal truth. Humanism also implies study of the humanities, i.e., literature, philosophy, art, poetry, music, etc., as distinguished from the sciences. Throughout his artistic, literary, musical and poetic career, Phillips has excelled in these humanistic activities. Thus, "Humumentism" is an art form that integrates humanistic activities through individual creative though that falls outside the current popular conception of artistic presentations.
Phillips traces his artistic lineage from his teachers back to their teachers and so to Raphael himself, but I believe that his work is better seen as an extension of early twentieth-century art movements: the Russian avant-garde, Italian Futurism, and British Vorticism. These movements were marked by the integration of humanistic activities that provided visual, poetic, spiritual, and intellectual aspects of viewing and interpretation not unlike the multilevelled pleasures encountered in the works of Tom Phillips." - Marvin Sackner"Some pre-Socratic philosophers conceived the cosmos as contained in a ring of fire, so that there were no stars like bright stones sparkling in the sky; rather, night's dark sphere was colandered with holes through which the outer fire showed, and our spangled sky was illusory. Illusory or not, those holes through which radiance streamed formed constellations; meaning ran from point to point in every watching eye; and then the shapes assumed the features of Perseus and Orion, reflecting heroic lives alleged to have been lived here on our own fair fields. From windows of illumination through lines of meaning to a course of life: that's how I like to think Tom Phillips' extraordinary literary Elysium is cosmologized. There is initially the word board like the outer firmament of fire we cannot see, divided arbitrarily as the print fell, from page to page, with its prose going about its business in ignorance of anything else, telling its own dated tale of Victorian times, a story that has now disappeared from every mind: this is the word soil of Phillips' A Humument, W.H. Mallock's 1892 novel A Human Document, which Phillips tells us he fetched from a bookstall in Peckham Rye for three pence.

Influenced early on by William S. Burroughs' "cut up" experiments, limited by an arbitrary budget of three pence, guided by propitious chance to Mallock's volume (which, by the happiest of coincidental ironies, is a novel pretending to be a discovered journal), and finally favored by the fact that A Human Document was found in a popular reprint version that might furnish additional copies, Tom Phillips' A Humument comes rationally, arbitrarily, fortuitously, gradually into existence just about the way everything in life does. It begins the way an epic ought: "The following sing I a book, a book of art of mind art and that which he hid reveal I." A Humument purports to be The Progress of Love of its principal character, Bill Toge, the surname from letters found in the words "altogether" and "together," which alone contain it and sustain him.
The verbal elements that tell Toge's story appear in blobular spaces that seem to blend the figure of the cartoon balloon with the banderole or the ribbony scroll that sometimes issued from the mouths of praying figures in 16th-century engravings. These spaces drip or trickle down the page where most of the time we can still see traces of Mallock's original text, but occasionally they crawl amoebalike in muck and grow as germs do in laboratory jellies, or fly the way buffeted balloons might through a tempest, or float like used condoms on a wider river. Not infrequently, they seem like paths or roads or creeks. Many times they will be found to contain tender bursting buttons and other abrupt poems.
Some of these terse verses are proverbial, gnomic, erotic, surreal, silly, revelatory, prophetic. Perhaps it is just a phrase that surprises you: "reason under a ruined hat," for instance, or a brief command like "read on, emotions," or a caption for the painted page, "sixteen portraits hanging from a dream," but they are almost always cryptic, sibylline, and as arresting as "she folded her attention to the carpet," or as amusingly disconcerting as the announcement that "I am remaining in London for the death of my ambition." Just as words contain words (the "love" in "glove" has always amused me), these staid Victorian pages can conceal (hidden prudently away like weevils in a biscuit) a wittily raunchy moment: "Have one of mine,' said the lover, as he produced his owna gorgeous product of Viennaand offered it distended to the great Fanny."
Above all, however, it is the design of the pages themselves that astonishes the eye and amazes the mind. Although Toge will usually appear as a Playdoh figure, near his signature window or sprawled in a chair, most of the environments Phillips has designed are abstract in a dazzling multiplicity of ways, semantically suggestive more often than not and frequently serving as a commentary on the bubbles into which Mallock's (and several of his characters') words have been allowed to rise. There are crisply outlined and safely contained color rounds and rectangles; there are fanciful scribbles and simulated writing; there are parodies of popular painters; there are fractured images and spaces, regimented squares, rows of canceled words looking like squashed bugs, lines flying as furiously away as message wires, indistinct layers of smudge and grime, collages, cartoons, wallpaper, curves lying about like clipped dyed hair. The result as you initially leaf, skip, and bound through the book is pure exhilaration. It is a joyful thing to be in the presence of such a rich variety of form and idea, wit and resonance, color and figure, paradox and puzzle, where the profound is rendered rightly as a doodle, and the page is reentered to encounter a bravura'd new'd world.
A more thought lifting of layers reveals linguistic, artistic, metaphysical issues that are as many and various and essential as those in a text by Aristotle. Mark out A Human Document as much as Phillips likes, Mallock's words lie beneath his illuminations like weeds in a field, for they are still in William H. Mallock's story; still were written, printed, bound, back then, in those different, not so different, days; still are going on about their initial business. And the window that Toge mopes and dreams by, perhaps because he's been put together like Dr. Frankenstein's golem from pieces and parts, opens/closes onto/into what? Does it lead the eye to still another realm, or back to the earlier world the words came from? Or through it do we see the pages to be created next?
The field of collage, of color and line, in concealing Mallock's original, releases outbursts of words that find themselves in an altogether new syntactical space; and there, like notes, they sing a painted music." -William H. Gass


"This work started out as idle play," Tom Phillips writes of A Humument in his book Works, Texts, to 1974. He offers similar versions of this explanatory history of the conception and execution of A Humument elsewhere: for example, in the long discussion which follows A Humument in its 1980 trade edition.
"I had read an interview with William Burroughs in the Paris Review (Fall 1965) and, as a result had played with the 'cut-up' technique, making my own variant (the column-edge poem) from current copies of the New Statesman. It seemed a good idea to push these semi-aleatoric devices into more ambitious service.
"I made a rule that the first (coherent) book that I could find for threepence (i.e. one and a quarter new pence) would serve."
On a "routine" Saturday walk with his friend, the American artist R.B. Kitaj, Phillips found, for exactly threepence, a copy of W.H. Mallock's 1892 novel, A Human Document. This book seemed likely to serve for the project he had begun to form and, in late 1966, Phillips began to work on it. At first he "merely scored out unwanted words with pen and ink."
"It was not long before the possibility became apparent of making a synthesis of word and image, the two intertwined as in a mediaeval miniature; this more comprehensive approach called for a widening of the technique to be used and of the range of visual imagery. Thus painting (in acrylic gouache) became the basic technique, with some pages still executed in pen and ink only, some involving typing and some using collaged fragments from other parts of the book (since a rule had grown up that no extraneous material should be imported into the work)."
The heroes of Mallock's novel, Robert Grenville and Irma Schilizzi, both retained roles in Phillips's treatment of the work. But Phillips also added a new major character, Bill Toge, who could appear only when Mallock had written the words "together" or "altogether" on a page. These are the only two words from which this characters surname can be constructed.
The story of Bill Toge, Phillips writes, is related to the commonplace Renaissance neoplatonic tale of "the Progress of Love" and has deliberate parallels with Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1499). Elsewhere, Phillips notes the influence of medieval manuscripts. In fact, A Humument is self-consciously an anthology of the entire history of the book, especially the illustrated book, from the medieval manuscript through the early printed book to the experimental and avant-garde book of recent vintage. Phillips himself called it "a paradoxical embodiment of Mallarme's idea that everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book".
Phillips' emphasises the role of chance when ever he tells the tale of the creation of this book. He selected Mallock's novel for treatment, he repeatedly writes, only because it fit his sole major criterion: price. Its found nature seems to suit the new text and images Phillips found, re-envisioned, and then re-presented, all of which had lain embedded within the words already present on Mallock's pages. In an entry in his notebook for 1966, Phillips called A Humument a "personal I Ching." Together with Phillips emphasis on chance and the found nature of his art, that phrase locates him within one significant stream of the modernist aesthetic.
The I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of changes, was rediscovered during the 1950's and '60's by artists and writers, notably John Cage. Helen and Kurt Wolff of Pantheon Books, its American publishers, brought out the English translation for the Bollingen Series in 1950. They gave a copy to their son, Christian Wolff, a composer who studied with Cage and with whose works Phillips is familiar. After Wolff gave Cage a copy of the I Ching, Cage and several of those he influenced found it a means of pressing past the boundaries and against the supposed limits of their crafts. Dissatisfied with then still largely normative assumptions about the role of reason, rationality, and rules, even in the creative worlds of artistic modernism, they used the I Ching to subvert or avoid such assumptions in their work.
Consultation of the I Ching indicates certain chances, or fates, which a person may choose to embrace. For artists in Cage's tradition, subjecting aesthetic considerations to such chance operations serves to move their creative practices away from personality and towards anonymity. Seeking instructions from Tarot cards or from throwing dice might be comparable operations. Mallarme's coup de ds ("a throw of the dice"), an early statement of this view, became a standard reference point for later artists and writers working in this tradition.
Initially, a minor eddy within the many currents of modernism, this stream became increasingly influential as the century progressed. It has become one of those aspects of the movements we call "modernism" which have served to push in the direction of what we now call "postmodernism". Tom Phillips is among those modernists who can trace their aesthetic descent from John Cage (and, beyond Cage, from Marcel Duchamp).
Cage is a major influence on and inspiration to Phillips, in part precisely for his exploration and celebration of the ways in which the artist can absorb and use chance. Phillips's 1967 painting, Ephemerides II, makes explicit his sense of Cage's importance to his work. In Cage, Phillips discovered an articulate artistic spokesperson for an aesthetic open to the shifting pulls and changing balances afforded a work's various realisations by its creators sensitive response to the "found" - to the element of chance. Cage was also an artist who worked, like Phillips, in a variety of media.
Despite his endebtedness to Cage, Phillips does not follow him to the outer limits of chance. The chance emergence of Mallock's novel would not have prevented its deliberate rejection, had Phillips found it unsuitable. But Phillips did not reject it. "For.....my purposes," he wrote, " his book is a feast. I have never come across its equal in later and more conscious searchings...I have...yet to find a situation, statement or thought which its words cannot comprehend or its phrases be adapted to cover". However open he was to chance, Phillips had no intention of becoming its creature. Artistic control and authorial voice both matter to him more than they mattered to Cage.
However accidentally Phillips may have found the book, his use of it is usually only distantly dependent on chance. Mallock's text proved "a feast" rather for his conscious - deliberate and controlled - purposes. The amount of variation among his treatments of single pages indicates the workings of anything but chance in his creation of this work.
A reading of Mallock suggests that there are good reasons why Phillips found him such "feast," in addition to those riches of vocabulary, reference, and allusion which Phillips specifies." -Daniel Traister

"The following work, though it has the form of a novel, yet for certain singular reasons hardly deserves the name."
This, the first sentence of Mallock's A Human Document, opens an "Introduction" which is a conventional authorial intervention assuring readers of the fundamental veracity of the tale they are about to read. What follows, the "Introduction" continues, is based on the scrapbooks and documents of real people, given to the narrator by a real person, which arrived neither ordered nor composed in any way. Their author's very identities require concealment.
Because of the nature of these manuscripts, the woman who provides the narrator with them comments, they are" something which ...[he] will have to pore and puzzle over. The narrator sees, despite their inchoate nature, that "some single thread of narrative" runs through them, "broken by pages after pages of letters, by scraps of poetry, and various other documents." The manuscripts are, the narrator concludes, "fragments of actual life" characterised by "baffled and crippled sentences," "abrupt transitions," and "odd lapses of grammar." "Mere nondescript fragments," they nonetheless add up, the narrator continues, to a woman's "life, and the life of another, turned literally inside out."
Well before it had reached Phillips, in other words, Mallock's text provided any interested reader with a recipe for its own construction, or re-construction, out of allegedly prior fragments. The method it proposed resembles in many ways what Phillips was to do with Mallock's novel itself. A Humument is a literal re-construction of A Human Document which Mallock (or his narrator) had allegedly constructed in much the same way, using materials just as refractory - and just as malleable. "As they stand," Mallock's narrator tells the lady, these materials "are not a story in any literary sense; though they enable us, or rather force us, to construct one out of them for ourselves."
The choice of a late Victorian novel to treat improved Phillips's chances of finding an appropriate vehicle for his project, wittingly or not. Underlying the apparent stability of Mallock's novel, and of the late Victorian period generally, is an undertone of instability. Often manifested as fear and uncertainty, this undertone might also have formal implications. The cut-and-paste method prescribed for the construction of a novel from the manuscripts Mallock's narrator receives recalls a form later to gain great significance in modern art: collage.
Collage became part of the standard repertory of techniques used by Cubists, Dadaists, and other modernists. They valued the technique both for its recuperation for art of materials not ordinarily considered as "art" and for its special ability to yoke unlike objects or fields of reference together in one visual field. Thus collage, a shaky assertion of stability, orders materials with no obvious or stable basis for their relationship into a framed composition. Many otherwise different modern sensibilities found these aspects of collage appealing. The technique relies on elements both of chance (what the artist could find that might work in the final assembly) and control (the artist determining the form which that assembly would take). Collage is a modern technique but it has older antecedents. The Sackner Archive, for example, contains an anonymous scrapbook dating from the end of the eighteenth century. It entered the Archive independently of Phillips and has no relationship to him. Yet its curiously "collage" -like techniques, which resemble practices later developed, far more self-consciously, by various twentieth century artists, offer a precedent for his achievement in A Humument much older than his more obvious modernist predecessors.
On its surface, Mallock's novel appears distinguished only by its utterly unrelieved conventionality. Yet Phillips's decision to adapt, or to "treat," this book may well be (as Phillips has always claimed) much more of a true collaboration between related artistic temperaments than at first meets the eye. Throughout his life and literary career, W.H. Mallock (1849 -1923) consistently tried to construct a politically conservative and religiously orthodox sanctuary from a world increasingly defined by modern science. "Construct" is the operative term here. No refuge could be entirely satisfactory which is merely found. It must instead be made by those people it would serve.
Mallock's political and religious views were threatened by many aspects of modernity. He sought nonetheless to construct an intellectually respectable means of reconciling the conflicting ways of apprehending the reality he experienced. But neither Mallock nor his contemporaries, however clearly they saw these threats and recognised their significance, could contain or control them. Their very efforts contained the seed of their failure. The undertone of radical instability often characteristic of their works reflects their awareness of this failure. Man-made constructs remain vulnerable to the alternative constructs of other people. Mallock, like many of his contemporaries, sought a kind of certainty which, finally, no man-made construct could provide. His disappearance from modern consciousness is a not completely unfair measure of the success with which his efforts at reconciliation met.
But it is not the only measure. For years, Mallock's A Human Document has been forgotten, Phillips's appropriation of the book has given it a new life. He has even revivified some of the cliches in which Mallock's "Introduction" abounds. So thoroughly does Phillips seem to build upon hints and instructions which litter the very surface of Mallock's "Introduction" that even to refer to "Phillips's appropriation" of Mallock is misleading. Surely, in an important sense, Mallock has "appropriated" Phillips." - Daniel Traister

"Introduction to A HUMUMENT by Tom Phillips
Like most projects that ended up lasting half a lifetime, this work started out as idle play at the fringe of my work and preoccupations. I had read an interview with William Burroughs (Paris Review 1965) and, as a result, had played with the “cut-up” technique, making my own variant (the column-edge poem) from current copies of the New Statesman. It seemed a good idea to push these devices into more ambitious service.
I made a rule; that the first (coherent) book I could find for threepence (i.e. one and a quarter pence) would serve.
Austin’s the furniture repository stood (until it closed in 1995) on Peckham Rye where Blake saw his first angels and along which Van Gogh had probably walked on his way to Lewisham. At this propitious place, on a routine Saturday morning shopping expedition, I found, for exactly threepence, a copy of A Human Document by W.H. Mallock, published in 1892 as a popular reprint of a successful three-decker. It was already in its seventh thousand at the time of the copy I acquired and cost originally three and sixpence. I had never heard of W.H. Mallock and it was fortunate for me that his stock had depreciated at the rate of a halfpenny a year to reach the requisite level. I have since amassed an almost complete collection of his works and have found out much about him. He does not seem a very agreeable person: withdrawn and humourless (as photographs of him seem to confirm) he emerges from his works as a snob and a racist (there are some extremely distasteful anti-semitic passages in A Human Document itself). He has however been the subject of some praise from A.J. Ayer for his philosophical dialogue The New Republic and A Human Document itself is flatteringly mentioned in a novel by Dorothy Richardson. However for what were to become my purposes, his book is a feast. I have never come across its equal in later and more conscious searchings. Its vocabulary is rich and lush and its range of reference and allusion large. I have so far extracted from it over one thousand texts, and have yet to find a situation, statement or thought which its words cannot be adapted to cover. To cite an example (one that shows how Mallock can be made ironically to speak for causes against his grain), I was preparing for an exhibition in Johannesburg (May 1974) and wanted to find some texts to append to paintings; I turned (as some might do to the I Ching) to A Human Document and found firstly:
wanted. A little white
opening out of thought.And secondly:
Delightful the white wonder
To have the sport and grasses
The ancient dread
Judgement now has come
Judgement suddenly. Black from a distance
Expected hurrying on.
Take a new turn
Back to reason.
More recently, in working on an illustrated edition of my own translation of Dante’s Inferno I have managed to find a hundred or so parallel texts from A Human Document which act as a commentary to the poem. I have even found sections of blank verse to match the translation as in this fragment which forms the halftitle:
My story of a soul’s surprise, a soul
which crossed a chasm in whose depths I find
I found myself and nothing more than that
When I started work on the book late in 1966, I merely scored unwanted words with pen and ink; (it was not long though before the possibility became apparent of making a better unity of word and image, intertwined as in a mediaeval miniature. This more comprehensive approach called for a widening of the techniques to be used and of the range of visual imagery, Thus painting (in watercolour or gouache) became the basic technique with some pages still executed in pen and ink only, some involving typing and some using collaged fragments from other parts of the book (since a rule had grown up that no extraneous material should be imported into the work). In some recent pages I have incorporated elements of their printed predecessors.
Much of the pictorial matter in the book follows the text in mood and reference: much of it also is entirely non-referential, merely providing a framework for the verbal statement and responding to the disposition of the text on the page. In every case the text was the first thing decided upon: some texts have taken years to reach a definitive state, usually because such a rich set of alternatives was present on a single page and only rarely because the page seemed quite intractable. In order to prove (to myself) the inexhaustibility of even a single page I started a set of variations of page 85: I have already made over twenty. The visual references used range from a telegram envelope to a double copy of a late Cézanne landscape.
The only means used to link words and phrases are the �rivers’ in the type of the original: these, if occasionally tortuous, run generously enough and allow the extracted writing to have some flow so that it does not become (except where this is desirable) a series of staccato bursts of words.
Occasionally chance procedures have been used. One page (p.99) executed in this way was first divided into half, and, by tossing coins, every word except one was eliminated from each half. Once again the book spoke (like the I Ching). It’s two word, in a faintly Jewish voice said (in 1967) �something already’. The title of the book itself was arrived at by invited accident: folding one page over and flattening it on the page beneath makes the running title read A HUMUMENT (ie A HUM(AN DOC)UMENT), which had an earthy sound to it suitable to a book exhumed from, rather than born out of, another. According to Mary Ann Caws, who has written at length on A Humument this procedure is called crasis.
The numerical order of the pages is not the chronological order of their making. The initial attack on the book was made by taking leaves at random and projecting the themes that emerged backwards and forwards into the volume. In the end the work became an attempt to make a Gesamtkunstwerk in small work, since it includes poems, music scores, parodies, notes on aesthetics, autobiography, concrete texts, romance, mild erotica, as well as the undertext of Mallock’s original story of an upper-class cracker-barrel philosopher ex-poet and diplomat, who falls in love with a sexy prospective widow from Hampstead (her husband is out of combat, being a sick man and, being a Jew, beyond the pale in any case).
Many rules have grown up in the course of the work. Although Mallock’s original hero (Grenville) and heroine (Irma) have their parts to play, the central figure of this version is Bill Toge (pronounced �toe-dj’). His adventures can only (and must) occur on pages which originally contained the words �together’ or �altogether’ (the only words from which his name can be extracted). He also has his own recurrent iconography; his insignia include a carpet and a window looking out onto a forest and his amoeba-like, ever-changing shape is always constructed from the rivers in the type. His story, the Progress of Love, is a favourite neo-platonic topos and there are deliberate parallels with the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili the most beautiful of printed books, published in Venice in 1499.
As well as A Humument itself, Mallock’s novel has been the source for other ventures, notably the complete score of an opera IRMA whose libretto, music, staging instructions and costume designs all come from A Human Document.
Other offshoots include Trailer (published by Editions Hansjorg Mayer. Stuttgart 1971), which is in effect garnered from the cutting floor of A Humument though a self-sufficient work, and DOC, a series of affidavits and testimonies which attempt to build up the picture of a lecherous doctor. There exists also small paintings which make variations of wording and design from the book itself and catch up on some lost opportunities in the original. Texts from the same Mallock novel also appear as pendants to paintings such as the series The Quest for Irma (1973) and Ein Deutsches Requiem: after Brahms. In preparation is a ballet scenario (with score and costume designs) which could either be performed separately (as The Quest for Grenville) or an an interlude in performances of IRMA.
As work went on and ramified, a second copy of A Human Document became necessary. Curiously it turned up in the other branch of the same furniture repository (though this time it cost 1/6d). This copy had belonged to one Lottie Yates who had herself �treated’ it to some extent, heavily underlining passages that seemed to relate to her won romantic plight (occasionally in the margin she had sighed �How true!’). It seems also that she had used it as a means of saying to her beloved the things she lacked words for, passing the underlined copy to him as a surrogate love letter. Thus in 1902, someone has already started to work the mine. The first copy had belonged to a Mr Leaning and was unmarked save for his signature. I have since acquired fifteen or so copies, many sent gratis from well wishers (notably Patrick Wildgust, most dedicated of Mallock hunters). Most have no sign of their owners: one, however, which was purchased at the Beresford Library, Jersey in 1893, by Colonel J.K. Clubley, passed eventually into the hands of someone who merely signs himself �Hitchcock’. The most recent additionhas been a copy supplied by a well-wisher from the library of Sir Gerald Kelly, a past President of the Royal Academy, though how he got it from �Nell’ to whom it was presented by �Michael’ in 1901 is not recorded.
The recent find of the original three-decker first printing has been somewhat of a disappointment. Its letters are big and, with its broad type-rivers and wide spacings it lacks the tight look of the single volume. Each word seems to have fewer neighbours. Yet a new quest started: an even more recondite curiosity had come to my notice in the form of a one-volume American edition, also published in 1892 (by the Cassell Publishing Co. of New York). I have recently acquired a copy of this version which differs on every page as a result of some cutting (mainly of French words in the original). I need hardly add that reasonably priced examples of the ordinary English popular edition would still be exceedingly welcome. To help me locate certain key words (when tackling the Dante Project for example) I have, with some help from others, compiled a complete concordance to A Human Document.
Virtually all the work on A Humument has been done in the evenings so that I might not, had the thing become a folly, regret the waste of days. One kind of impulse that brought this book into slow being was the prevailing climate of textual criticism. As a text A Humument was not unaware of what then occupied the page of Tel Quel (and by now must already have ceased to be a fashionable feature of undergraduate essays). A Humument exemplifies the need to �do’ structuralism, and, (as there are books both of and on philosophy) to be of it rather than on it. At its lowest it is a reasonable example of bricolage, and at its highest it is perhaps a massive deconstruction job taking the form of a curious unwitting collaboration between two-ill suited people seventy-five years apart. It is the solution for this artist of the problem of wishing to write poetry while not in the real sense of the word being a poet…he gets there by standing on someone else’s shoulders.
Publication of A Humument was started in 1970 by the Tetrad Press with a box of ten silk-screened pages which made up Volume I. Other volumes (ten in all, containing varying quantities of pages) were printed by lithography, silkscreen and letterpress in a limited edition of one hundred copies. The original manuscript was completed in the autumn of 1973 and was shown within days of that event, in its entirety, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (in whose bulletin, then edited by Jasia Reichardt, it was first mentioned in 1967).
This revised new edition in book form differs from the private press edition in that several new pages have been substituted for these first versions – sixty or so in the first revised edition (green cover) and another hundred in the second revised printing. If this book finds favour (ie sells), and I live, it will need no more than two further editions to make the last Humument a complete replacement of the first, page for page.
In a sense, because A Humument is less than what it started with, it is a paradoxical embodiment of Mallarmé’s idea that everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book."

Samantha Power: A Humument explicatio

Official site for Humument

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