John Latham (b. 1921 Northern Rhodesia – 2006 London, England) is one of the most important British artists of the twentieth century. In many of his most famous works he chews, piles and burns books as a way of absorbing, interpreting and putting to use the information within, as an expession of his belief that we understand our position in the universe through a time-based tradition rather than an object-based tradition.