I can’t let the death of Tom Phillips pass without a tribute to his magnum opus, The Postcard Century, published in 2000 and still widely available. More than any other anthologiser of postcards, Tom Phillips dived deep into the mysteries of his subject. This survey is like a geologist’s core sample retrieved from a century’s accumulation of ephemera. The Postcard Century is a heroic compilation of all the finest qualities that postcards possess and evidence of a massive commitment in terms of time and resources, put together by a collector with a passion for postcards that extended beyond periods and subjects. The book displays a year-by-year selection that crosses virtually all genres and categories and is enriched by the correspondence that the author has transcribed from the reverse, thus adding greatly to the social documentary feel of the enterprise. It is quite simply a humane and fascinating book that can be opened at any page, instantly immersing the reader in a chronicle of lost voices and lost times. The visual images and the transcribed text are mutually enhancing and add up to a lot more than the sum of their parts. If he had produced nothing else in his life this book would remain a great achievement. As it is, Tom Phillips had a long and industrious career across a great variety of visual media in the course of which he never settled for second best. The range of his activities made him difficult to categorise which goes a long way to explain his absence from the Great Narrative of Artists of Substance. All the better for that, I would say.
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