Monthly Archives: January 2025

First edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy!

We are very happy to announce a wonderful gift received in December of 2024: a first edition of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621.

How did we get so lucky? In 2017, Warren Zanes visited Colorado College to promote his book on Tom Petty. CC prof Steve Hayward had a great conversation with him on Critical Karaoke, and they stayed in touch. In 2024, the year of his Bruce Springsteen book, Zanes came back to CC to teach a class in music journalism. Soon after that, he inherited a copy of the very rare and valuable 1621 Anatomy of Melancholy, and reached out to Steve, a former bookdealer, for advice. Steve in turn talked to Special Collections, and we (well, I, Jessy Randall) introduced Zanes to bookdealer Glenn Horowitz (my former employer) for an appraisal. Happily for CC, Zanes decided to donate the book to us!

What is The Anatomy of Melancholy, and why is it important? In a 2001 article in The Guardian, Nicholas Lezard describes it as “the book to end all books … a 17th-century compendium of human thought that is funnier than it sounds.” Author Robert Burton (“Democritus Junior” on the title page) was a scholar and librarian at Oxford University. According to Lezard, his goal with the book was no less than “to explain and account for all human emotion and thought.” It grew to 500,000 words by its sixth and final edition.

This particular copy, before it came to the Zanes family, was the property of Amos Copleston, born in 1638 in Cornwall, England. He wrote an ownership inscription, “Amos Coplestone his book 1690,” and then wrote it again twice more, “Amos Coplestone his book,” for a total of three times, twice at the front and once at the back. The Zanes family left no ownership marks. We have now placed a small Colorado College bookplate on the front pastedown.

CC prof Jared Richman has already come by the library to admire the new acquisition. He plans to bring his Book History & Materiality students to Special Collections for a closer look. And that’s what it’s all about at CC, staving off melancholy by teaching and learning and reading and writing and thinking.

Diary of an overland journey

A page from the Phipps materials

Assistant Curator Amy Brooks writes:

Some days, in the job I have had the good fortune to hold for 21 years, I get to do something quite special. Today, I got to catalog an amazing travel diary, that of Emma Phipps, a young woman who made the arduous journey from Massachusetts to Colorado Springs in 1880. In the 26-page handwritten diary, and in letters home to her sister Ella and to their mother, she vividly and eloquently – sometimes disparagingly, but always with a sense of wonder – describes the raw and rugged terrain: ferocious wind and ubiquitous dust, the dearth of rain, towering silver mountains and crackling-brown prairies and plains, cacti and flora, wild rivers they forded; the cows and horses and burros and prairie dogs. She paints a picture of burgeoning towns peopled with railroad men, cattle ranchers, cowboys, and miners; also sometimes, wealthy, elegantly attired beneficiaries of the then-booming mining and railroad industries. She writes of places now well-known: Denver, Manitou Springs, Canon City, Pueblo, Ute Pass; the San Juans and Pikes Peak. Hers is a firsthand account of the rough-and-tumble early days of the Old West. (No mention of the land’s original and rightful inhabitants, a story embedded in the gaps of this one.)

The author, with her brother Martin, came West seeking the promise of health benefits for his unnamed illness. Emma alludes to her brother’s ill-health and his desire to “camp out” and find refuge in Nature. One can only speculate about what ailed Martin (two letters written by him are in this archive), but it would be wonderful to have a CC student or any researcher illuminate the gaps in this post-Civil War tale.

On days like this, voices reach me from the past and say, “We were here.” It reminds me of our transient stay on this planet, and the importance of respecting it and living our best lives on it. Also, of the importance of writing down our stories, preferably on paper, dated and signed.

The Emma Phipps archive is cataloged here.