The Anatomy of Melancholy Introduction by Holbrook Jackson. New introduction by William H. Gass

One of the major documents of modern European civilisation, Robert Burton's astounding compendium, a survey of melancholy in its myriad forms, has invited nothing but superlatives since its publication in the seventeenth century. Lewellyn Powys called it 'the greatest work of prose of the greatest period of English prosewriting', while the celebrated surgeon William Osler declared it the greatest of medical treatises. And Dr Johnson, Boswell reports, said it was the only book that he rose early in the morning to read with pleasure. In this surprisingly compact and elegant new edition, Burton's spectacular verbal labyrinth is sure to delight, instruct, and divert today's readers as much as it has those of the past four centuries.