It is, after all, my resource of greatest use – and all thanks to a man who, from photographs and contemporary accounts of his personality, would seem to be someone I would not at all have enjoyed meeting. Both old and new works from A Humument are exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. A silkscreen print from 1970 One Woman In The Dusk, and an oil collage painting Irma: Scenes from an Opera, completed 2013

Illuminated Tweets, an exhibition exploring the development of A Humument through new media at the Saison Poetry Library as part of the Southbank Centre's Web We Want FestivalHumument fragments are incorporated into illustrations for an elegant new edition of Cicero: Orations pub. The Folio Society Aspects of Art: A Painter's Alphabet, featuring A Humument alphabet is published by Bellew in association with Dulwich Picture Gallery TP: Epic? Dante used the word commedia to describe his major work: the word divine was added by later fans like Boccaccio — comedy because its central figure was not a grandee. Perhaps A Humument is more in the genre of a pillowbook. Though it starts with the generic clarion call, “I sing,” it can’t really be an epic, though it has been an epic venture and an epic task. Dante’s teacher, Ser Brunetto, whom he meets in hell again, was famous for a little book of thoughts, Il Tesoretto. So that might be a good typology not to leave my book stranded in a category of one. Certain Trees: The Constructed Book, Poem and Object, a special display curated by Elizabeth James of the National Art Library at V&A South Kensington

Thus classical mythology joins medieval poetry together with an early 19th-century Spanish painting, a Victorian novel and a 20th-century American film, linking late modern architecture to a 21st-century disaster. A Humument became a touchstone of Phillips's oeuvre. The Royal Academy’s 2015 Summer Exhibition dedicated a full room to it. Quotations from A Humument populate his other paintings, works of art criticism, and some of the songs he wrote when returning to music in the 1990s. Irma, a central character and the muse of A Humument, gave her name to an opera – conceived in 1969, recorded in 1977 and 1988, with its full score published in 2015. A new production directed by Netia Jones premièred at the South London Gallery in September 2017. The Atlantic, Volume 266 No.4 Oct. Pamela Petro's essay "Books as Works of Art" describes " A Humument" by Tom Phillips as "perhaps the most famous artist's book to date" CORTEXt: a survey of recent visual poetry Hermetic Gallery Milwaukee featuring A Humumentwith catalogue

Irma by AMM & Tom Phillips is released on CD by Matchless Recordings listen here on UBU web http://www.ubu.com/sound/phillips.html A Humument p10 Give Me Tomorrow and A Humument p154 Our Excellent Exodus in limited editions are exhibited Royal Academy Summer Exhibition In One Side & Out the Other pub. Ferry Press includes 21 illustrations by Phillips using Humument procedures A further Humument collage work Memory After Memory published as a limited edition print for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

Fragments of text from A Humument appear in a suite of prints O Chateaux oh Saisons, published by Wine Arts Aspects of British Book Art today, Saturday's Book Arts Gallery, with catalogue. The exhibition features A Humument, and bindings of A Humument and Heart of A Humument by Pella Erskine Tulloch and Richard Minsky KR: You’ve written that the goal of the work is to replace itself completely, and that in a cycle of six editions you will have achieved this. Is this still the plan? What’s the sixth edition looking like? New Humument fragment collage works are realised as limited edition prints. Loving You, Marriage Happens Together in the Train exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition British Council exhibition 'Tom Phillips Graphics' tours for 8 years to France, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Jamaica finishing in Iraq in 1988I took a forgotten novel found by chance. I mined, and undermined its text to make it yield alternative stories, erotic incidents and surreal catastrophes, which lurked within its wall of words. I replaced with visual images the text I’d stripped away. 'A Humument' began to tell, amongst other memories, dreams and reflections, the sad story of Bill Toge, one of love’s casualties.’

Phillips gives a reading from A Humument at his local independent bookshop 'Review' in Bellenden Road TP: Cage became, more than anything, a moral exemplar for me — showing, as Wittgenstein says, that ethics and aesthetics are one and the same thing (I would go farther to say that ethics is a subset of aesthetics). As for Eno, I was a reluctant and largely ineffectual teacher, and gave it [teaching] up as soon as I could afford to. Brian started as a student, and I as a tutor, on the same day. It was my first job. Brian was my best student — in fact almost the only one I can remember, except for some amazing looking girls. But that was almost fifty years ago, and the lines of age converge in that now he is just a friend and colleague, and we both believe one should sing every day (and louder sing…). He has produced and performed in Irma, and he wrote a song for a concert I gave in Oxford of music by various composer friends based on A Humument texts. His was “It Felt Like Running Away,” which he performed, and I was in the chorus, my last public singing gig… somewhere there is a recording. There is a portrait I did of him in the National Portrait Gallery, and he was at my seventy-fifth birthday party: so it’s a long story. I mention this here to show that A Humument is a chronicle also of family and friends, with things and people coming in and out of focus over the years. By the time I finish it, it will feel like that poem by Patrice de La Tour du Pin: “Ici venue mon histoire s’achève. / Quels passagers m’ont suivi jusqu’au bout?” [“I’ve come thus far, my story winds up here: / What passengers have seen me to the end?”] I haven’t got the book at hand, and since I’ve carried these lines in my head for many years, I may be in part misquoting them, as I usually find when I look up bits of Shakespeare that I think I know. Phillips focused on EnglishatOxford, but alsotook drawing classes and lessons on Renaissance iconography, and he later studied under the artist Frank Auerbach at the Camberwell School of Art.Perhaps thankstothat diverse arrayof study, A Humument is hard to fit into any existing categories of works, whether artistic or literary. Ithas both the sui generis obsessiveness of folk art, the intensely sophisticated craftmanship of medieval illuminated manuscripts, and a solid dose of 20th-centuryavant-gardism. “It didn’t have a genre at all,” Phillips said. “So I called it a treated novel.” How to draw characters, just do what he does on 103, 110, 166, 273, 324, 344, 346, 347, or at 355, 361. It’s amazing, beautiful, and simple. TP: The art world now is behaving as a branch of the fashion business, and I am pleased always to have it now almost received as a primarily literary work by people with a fitter attention span than the those who flit from novelty to novelty like the puppet collectors of the art world’s ever falser reality.Cover artwork for the album Tom Phillips Words & Music features fragments from A Humument. (edition hansjorg mayer) while in the publication, Tom Phillips Works Texts to 1974 (edition hansjorg mayer) Phillips writes extensively about A Humument and other Humument related projects, such as plans for the ballet The Quest for Grenvill.