The Heart of a Humument

New York: The Talfourd Press, 1984. Unique first edition of The Heart of a Humument, a near-miniature iteration of A Humument, the decades-long altered book project by English artist Tom Phillips (1937-2022). In an ambitious design binding by Richard Minsky, founder of New York City’s Center for Book Arts, this copy was part of Phillips’s own library; the artist’s handwritten colophon in this copy identifies it as number 5 of 30 copies “of the special edition of this book for Minsky.” 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, 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. The Heart of A Humument is a compact pocket variation that isolates the central 2½ x 2-inch portion of A Humument’s pages, visually focusing on the “heart” of Phillips’s text. 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. A fine copy of this collaborative livre d’artiste, in a unique design binding, from the library of creator Tom Phillips. Single volume, measuring 4 x 3 inches: [144]. Design binding of full red morocco, upper board inlaid with hand-colored pieced morocco stamped with the title and author’s name in imitation of Phillips’s designs, hand-painted spine, lower turn-in stamp-signed “Minsky 86” in gilt; red and green floral endpapers, edges stained red and overpainted with gold to create a burnished effect. Color illustrations on every page. Hand-lettered colophon before first leaf of text, signed by Phillips; printed colophon hand-colored and signed by Phillips at rear, dated 1984. Small imperfections to morocco of lower board; short split to paper at gutter of free endpapers. Housed in a custom clamshell box with lithographed title label. (Inventory #: 1004085)