Ruth Sackner contributed an essay to this issue titled "the Avant-Garde Book: Precursor of Concrete and Visual Poetry and the Artist's Book." Writing about Tom Phillips' A Humument, she stated "The blending of literature, poetry, and visual art is extremely successful in the work of Tom Phillips. In the main, his work derives from personal intellectual explorations, mythological languages, historic paintings, postcard images, and classical literature and poetry. These are presented in an amazing variety of artistic formats. Tom Phillips has used the book in particular to span the distinction between word and image, for as he says, "in a sense, because A Humument is less than what it started with, it is a paradoxical embodiment of Mallarme's idea that everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book."" "Ending as a book" may very well be the credo of contemporary book artists who knowingly continue the ideas of the avant-garde and the concrete and vis-ual poets into our time. We, too, plan to continue to collect, exhibit, and describe the words, images, and objects from our Archive in the spirit of the artist-poets whose work we so greatly admire." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.