In 1966 Tom Phillips picked up a copy of the Victorian novel A Human Document from a thrift store, took it home then re-wrote the story completely by collaging, painting and drawing into the text. The finished book is a beautiful piece of work with brightly coloured pages and just a few words of text showing through on each page, forming short poems that give the book an entirely new meaning. He even created a new protagonist called Bill Toge whose name only appears when either ‘together’ or ‘altogether’ are printed in the original text.

Over the summer we set workshop participants the task of making their own Humuments, and you can see some of their lovely books below: