Selections from the Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

Selections from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton telescopes 350 years, the period from the 1620s to the 1970s. It is what artist William E. Jones imagined Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy would have looked like had it appeared in the pages of Drummer magazine. In preparing the book, Jones condensed Burton’s vast 450,000-word masterpiece of 17th Century English literature to a small fraction of its length, and paired the excerpts with vintage images of leather men at work and play. Robert Burton was fascinated by the variations of human sexuality, albeit more as an observer than as a participant. He wrote about sex in covert Latin passages that are newly translated in Jones’s book. Selections from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton is a delightfully perverse condensation of Burton’s speculations on the sexual proclivities that subsequent generations of gay men put into exuberant practice.