William E. Jones’s artists’ book Selections from “The Anatomy of Melancholy” by Robert Burton is an intelligent, well-executed triple appropriation synthesized into a multi-layered, transhistorical meditation on 1970s-era leather culture. It is the third of four Jones books published by 2nd Cannons, along with Is It Really So Strange? (2006), Tearoom (2008), and Heliogabalus (2009). All reflect a dominant theme in the artist’s considerable body of work: interrogating the socially constructed nature of homosexuality through appropriation of its representations in historical and contemporary media.

As such the book is an excellent complement to Jones’s time-based work in film, video, and installation. The Los Angeles artist’s accomplishments include a Tate Modern retrospective (2005), two Whitney Biennials, and inclusion in the 2009 Venice Biennale. Jones also teaches film at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and has worked in adult video as the pseudonymous Hudson Wilcox.

This modestly priced edition of five hundred is printed in a letter-size format, staple-bound, and self-covered in coated white stock. With the exception of spot color on the cover, the book is printed in one color (black). In a gratifying précis, Jones explains the work’s numerous references, which in turn elucidate format choices. For instance, the text is composed of selections from a seventeenth-century treatise on “Love-Melancholy,” introduced with an early eighteenth-century biography of its author, the scholar and vicar Robert Burton. The artist then adapted these to the format of the leather magazine Drummer (1975–1999), illustrated with numerous, evocative images from 1975 and 1976 issues.

When evaluating artists’ books, one criterion is to consider the degree to which the book is the most effective form for the idea. In other words, why a book as opposed to any other medium? The test is especially relevant here, for the artist “originally intended the edited text . . . as a film script” (3). If the work was a byproduct of the script, was it repurposed into a book by choice or circumstance? While Jones could have published it “straight,” without consideration of form, he has instead successfully transformed it into an artists’ book by fusing Burton’s text with not one but several poignant print genres. One could also argue that Burton’s work, as skillfully excerpted by Jones, simply reads well as a text—though the notion of it as a film script is intriguing, for I am also coming to believe that contemporary artists’ books would benefit from analysis as a time-based medium, a topic I hope to explore elsewhere.

Each text excerpt is laid out as an illustrated article, conveniently arranged as the magazine’s table of contents, with entries such as “Other causes of Love-Melancholy, Sight, Being from the Face, Eyes, and other parts, and how it pierceth” (3). Jones adds yet another dimension to the text when he states that Burton “wrote about sex in Latin rather than in the vernacular, so that only scholars had access to these passages” (3). This is another wonderful inversion, for both had to steer clear of the mainstream: Drummer by circulating underground and Burton by publishing in an elite language.

The Burton/Drummer sections bookend an extended middle sequence composed mostly of campy film stills depicting torture—think Charlton Heston epics. This in turn envelops a literal centerfold, presumably also drawn from the magazine. The film-still section ends with a clever twist: the final image reproduces a Théodore Géricault drawing titled Nude Being Tortured. Was this, too, from the magazine? Yes or no, the inserted section evinces the work’s intelligence, for it confirms the gesture of appropriating appropriation. Just as porn magazine editors mined popular culture for erotica, Jones has done the same but then turns it around, mining erotica for art.

The book’s narrative arc is a sexual one, especially in a leather context. It traces restraint and longing, tortured desire, confrontation, and finally release. The encounter begins with the first several sections in which Burton expounds upon causes of general melancholy (including “overmuch study” (12)). To today’s reader even these impersonal ruminations reveal subtext, as in the author’s discursion on “idleness . . . or want of exercise [as] the bane of body and mind, the nurse of naughtiness, stepmother of discipline, the chief author of all mischief . . . the devil’s cushion, his pillow and chief reposal” (11).

The final third of the narrative becomes more personal, with Burton positioning himself as “an old, a grave discreet man,” yet the “fittest to discourse of love matters, because he hath likely more experience, observed more” (34). After several segments of such exposition Burton finally “comes out” in the culminating section, concluding that “The last and best Cure of Love-Melancholy is to let them have their Desire” (30).

The success of Selections depends on the exquisite juxtaposition of the delicate seventeenth-century narrative with the grainy frankness of 1970s porn. This is seen most clearly in the delightfully uneven quality of the evocative photos, which reference centerfolds and emphasize the appropriated nature of the imagery. For example, in many photos one sees a fold line, presumably an artifact of the original magazine. These become erotic in themselves, as in the frontispiece, in which a fold line perfectly pierces a nipple.

This frisson is found also in the contrast between the hyper-rational, conformist (and by then ubiquitous) typeface Helvetica and the low-end production values of the underground publication. Presumably this choice reflects the original magazine—which would explain the poor letter spacing.

Harder to understand is the choice to print no pages (except for the cover) in full or partial bleed. This leaves a distracting white border that contrasts with the dominant black background. It appears unlikely to reflect the original magazine. Is the border an artifact of print-on-demand? A way to keep production costs low and avoid the preciousness of a small-run edition? Or perhaps—one hopes—the intention is to put visual quotation marks around the work as a whole, signaling its conceptual reframing as art.

Finally, one must also point out the elegiac quality about Selections, skillfully evoking as it does a brief moment of liberation, post-Stonewall and pre-AIDS, the decade of the Village People—yet also the decade of conservative U.S. Supreme Court decisions defining publications like Drummer as obscenity.

In that framework, perhaps the most poignant aspect of Selections is unstated. Based on a bit of Web exploration, I conclude that the work constitutes a subtle but strong link between Burton, Jones, and Drummer’s founding editor, Jack Fritscher. According to his online bio, the PhD-holding Fritscher is a “double-jointed author of literary fiction as well as of erotic fiction.” Common to the three, then, is radical publishing, as courageous an act in this century as in the seventeenth.