{"id":1135,"date":"2025-01-24T23:48:06","date_gmt":"2025-01-24T23:48:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/ccspecialcollections\/?p=1135"},"modified":"2026-02-11T23:07:04","modified_gmt":"2026-02-11T23:07:04","slug":"first-edition-of-the-anatomy-of-melancholy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/ccspecialcollections\/2025\/01\/24\/first-edition-of-the-anatomy-of-melancholy\/","title":{"rendered":"First edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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<\/em>, 1621.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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How did we get so lucky? In 2017, Warren Zanes visited Colorado College to promote his book on Tom Petty. CC prof Steve Hayward<\/a> had a great conversation with him on Critical Karaoke<\/a>, 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<\/em>, 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<\/a> (my former employer) for an appraisal. Happily for CC, Zanes decided to donate the book to us! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is The Anatomy of Melancholy<\/em>, and why is it important? In a 2001 article in The Guardian<\/a><\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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CC prof Jared Richman<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":413,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cc-special-collections"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3q4oW-ij","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/ccspecialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/ccspecialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/ccspecialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/ccspecialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/413"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/ccspecialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1135"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/ccspecialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1144,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/ccspecialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135\/revisions\/1144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/ccspecialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/ccspecialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/ccspecialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}