Democritus Junior to the Reader, page 19

I've always found something very compelling about lists. Cataloguing, collecting, hoarding, piling, compiling, heaping, amassing, enumerating, archiving, reminiscing... are melancholy preoccupations par excellence. "I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method; I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries, with small profit for want of art, order, memory, judgment..." (pp. 17–18). Anatomy of Melancholy might be an attempt to bestow order onto this jumbled mass of knowledge. The sheer quantity of compulsively accumulated items is both the source of melancholy and a pretext for an activity that purports to be its cure.

The avalanche of worldly tidings that the melancholy writer contends with – "I hear news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged..."  – even as it emphasizes novelty – "news ... New books ... new paradoxes ... in a new shifted scene ... new discoveries ... new lords and officers created ... fresh honours conferred ... both private and public news..." – dissolves into monotony – "again ... and again ... and again...". Nihil novi sub sole. 

Robert E. Belknap published a wonderful book in 2004 on literary lists (The List – The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing, Yale University Press), which focuses on modern writers' penchant for creating inventories: Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville... In the introductory chapter, he cites a list drawn up by Henry Peacham (1546–1634) in The Garden of Eloquence (1577), which might help the reader classify some melancholy registers:

  Congeries — A multiplication or heaping together of many words signifying diverse things of like nature.
  Conglobatio — When we bring in many definitions of one thing, yet no such definitions as do declare the pith of the matter, but others of another kind all heaped together, which do amplify most pleasantly.
  Dinumeratio — When we number up many things for the love of amplifying. This differeth from Congeries, for Congeries heapeth up words, and this sentences.
  Distributio — When we dilate and spread abroad the general kind by numbering and reckoning the special kinds; the whole by dividing it into parts ... the General into the Special (which distributeth to every person his due business).
  Enumeratio — When we gather together those things into a certain number, which straightaway we do briefly declare.
  Expolitio — When we abide still in one place yet seem to speak many things, many times repeating one sentence, but with other words and figures.
  Incrementum — When by degrees we ascend to the top of something, or rather above the top; that is, when we make our saying grow and increase by an orderly placing of our words, making the latter word always exceed the former. ... In this figure, order must be diligently observed, that the stronger may follow the weaker, and the worthier the less worthy; otherwise you shall not increase the Oration, but make a mingle mangle, as doth the ignorant, or else make a great heap, as doth Congeries.
  Ordinatio — A figure which doth not only number the facts before they be said, but also doth order those facts, and maketh them plain by a kind of definition.
  Partitio — When the whole is divided into parts.
  Synonimia — When by a variation and change of words that be of like signification we iterate one thing diverse times.

Shaun Usher compiled quite a delightful anthology of inventories in his Lists of Note – An Eclectic Collection Deserving of a Wider Audience (Chronicle Books, 2015), which runs from Peter Roget's Thesaurus entry on existence to Benjamin Franklin's Drinker's Dictionary and Edmund Wilson's lexicon of Prohibition, to Roland Barthes j'aime / je n'aime pas (which begs to be supplemented by Annette Messager's Les hommes que j'aime / les hommes que je n'aimes pas), to Norman Mailer's paltry list of ten favorite American novels (which makes one dream instead of the lists of authors to be read / not to be read drawn up by the French Surrealists with the melancholy compulsion of indiscriminate readers thoroughly familiar with the contents of both the lefthand and righthand columns), to Galileo's shopping list (one of my favorites in the book, even as I envision a volume containing all shopping lists that ever made an appearance in literature or were simply tucked into a book)...

The best book about lists must be the erudite Umberto Eco's La Vertigine della Lista (Rizzoli, 2009), the vertigo of lists, translated as The Infinity of Lists. I admit, I have not read it, something I shall try to remedy. 

If Eco repertories lists, I imagine he would start with the Bible: who hasn't yawned themselves into ennui over the endless begats which probably delighted and inspired Rabelais in creating the genealogies of Gargantua and Pantagruel and his whole cornucopia of inventories. 

two (of several) pages of "begats" from François Rabelais's Pantagruel [1532] (Paris: Éditions de la Sirène, 1920)

Every list worth its salt ends with

𝖊𝖙𝖈.