In the afterward, Marjorie Perloff refers to E.A. Abbot's "Flatland, originally published in 1884 and reprinted by Princeton University Press in 1991. The Victorian Abbot invents a two-dimentional universe inhabited entirely by polygons. beaulieu's writing-through of this whimsical tale immediately brings to mind Tom Phillips's 'A Humument', but there is, in fact, little similarity between the two texts. For whereas Phillips's treated book foregrounds and reframes particular passages in his source text, W.H. Mallock's 'A Human Document', producing delicious parodies, cartoon narratives, double entendres and sexual punning, beaulieu's 'Flatland' contains no words whatsoever - indeed, not even the letters of the alphabet, much less ideograms or symbols." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.