So. While doing research for a class I found this gem, went down the obligatory rabbit hole of research, and felt the compulsive desire to share what I found, as per usual.

In 1966, Tom Phillips walked into a furniture warehouse with a fellow artist and said that he would buy the first book that he could find for threepence and dedicate his life to working on it. That book turned out to be a Victorian novel by William Hurrell Mallock called The Human Document, a title that could not have aligned better with the product that Phillips would end up producing.

“The first book I can find for threepence, I’ll work on for the rest of my life.”

For the next handful of years he devoted himself to reimagining each page through intricate collage work, poetic excavation, and incredible imagination. And while he finished this first copy in 1970, he described looking at it and feeling that there was so much more for him to still do. Each page was a metropolis and he had only ventured down one avenue. He wanted more. He would spend the next 46 years getting it.

“I started it for fun. [Thinking] That’s interesting, that’s not bad to do.”

Within that span of time, Phillips explained feeling as if he were working both with and against the author and the original idea of the text, describing how “It’s a kind of collaboration and a kind of fight at the same time”. He worked to excavate meanings that the author may not have wanted to appear just as much as he did to highlight things clearly intended to stand out.

Phillips also shared some interesting insight into what it feels like to be an artist. He talked about how one is never truly alone in their work, for each one of us draws inspiration from innumerable muses. Whether these muses are people, places, or experiences, they subconsciously guide our hands in whatever we are creating. They keep us company. They inform our work, even if we don’t fully realize to what extent. Referred to as ghosts by Phillips, I think that that description is beautifully fitting. For I cannot help but feel that all of my favorite authors and creatives linger around my world like spirits, allowing me to find pockets of inspiration here and there that I would not have seen on my own. They sit in the corners of every room I write in, smoking cigarettes and dangling their legs off loveseats. Sometimes they sit down to dinner with me only to whisper sentences into my ears that I have to jump up to go scribble somewhere. They are my great companions.

“Nobody works on their own. There are all sorts of models that everyone has. We have great huge ghosts like Shakespeare and the Bible, but we also have people that we’ve met.”

When asked about the process of using a completed novel for his own work, he responded by explaining that “Anything I can use, I’ll use. Anything I can borrow, I’ll borrow and steal”, a point that I don’t think a lot of people understand when first approaching art. I remember one of my teachers in high school telling me that “all great writers steal” and how much I loved that. For I am always writing things down that I hear throughout the day, that I read in books, that I say to myself when driving home, and turning it all into something else later on. Art is always piecemeal. Whether it’s explicit or not, it’s implied by the sheer nature of the human condition. We live inside one another. This reminded me of Mark Bradford, a contemporary artist who uses salon endpapers and street signs to create his own art. I’ve written more about his work here.

What I found really interesting is that despite spending fifty years creating this poetic masterpiece, Phillips does not call himself a poet. He states that “I’m not really a poet but my capacity to be as such in exercised in this book”. I think there is a lot of beauty in that, for he didn’t set out to create a poetic collection, it just happened to turn out that way.

“It is a poem. It is a poem. That’s what it is. My poem. It’s as near as I get.”

In 2016 the second version of A Humument was published. Phillips has called this the last version for, after fifty years, he finally feels that there is nothing more to do be done with it. “It’s a wrap as they say”. He closes out by sharing that this project has been a special endeavor for him and that he hoped others come notice it as well. I love this, for it captures an artist not motivated by popular attention, but rather by some mysterious inner need to create something. The admiration of others is merely a bonus. That kind of art is always priceless.

“It occupies a space in my vision and i hope in some people’s minds.”

You can check out the full video of Phillips discussing his work here and a written interview here. This is also a cool one.

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