Studies in bibliography :: :: University of Virginia Library

As every pioneer well knows, crossing borders and venturing into new territories
can be a difficult and dangerous undertaking. When D. F. McKenzie
delivered the inaugural Panizzi Lectures, "Bibliography and the Sociology
of Texts," in 1985 at the British Library, it was his application of sociology
to bibliography that attracted attention, both pro and con. McKenzie's marshalling
of these conjoined disciplinary perspectives was hardly new, however.
He first used the concept, "the sociology of the text," and began to

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develop the idea as a component of his revisionist program in the second of
his Sandars Lectures in 1976,[30]
making further applications in "Typography
and Meaning: the Case of William Congreve" (delivered in 1977, but not
published until 1981).[31] "Type-Bound Topography" (1982) and his 1983
Presidential Address to the Bibliographical Society both enlarged and
extended his intellectual project well before the Panizzi Lectures were
established.[32]

In his first lecture, McKenzie—expert bibliographer, printing historian,
and chronicler of apprentices' entrance into the Stationers' Company—explained
in summary fashion the necessary elements for conducting a sociology
of texts, first by invoking some fundamental principles from Herbert
Spencer's classic work, The Study of Sociology (1873): " `Sociology has to recognize
truths of social development, structure, and function.' "[33] Dilating on
Spencer's text, McKenzie then commented:

As I see it, that stress on structure and function is important. . . . At one level, a
sociology simply reminds us of the full range of social relations which the medium
of print had to serve, from receipt blanks to bibles. But it also directs us to consider
the human motives and interactions which texts involve at every stage of their
production, transmission, and consumption. It alerts us to the roles of institutions,
and their own complex structures, in affecting the forms of social discourse, past and
present. (p. 15)

Although it would be a gross oversimplification to suggest that the marrying
of sociology to bibliography produces the offspring of book history, it is
nevertheless true that an amicable and generative partnership between these
subjects is essential if the nascent interdisciplinary endeavor we call "the
history of the book" is to mature toward its full potential. Because the future
stature of book history depends upon the accommodation—if not the integration—of
these two disciplines in scholarly research, it is deeply worrying
that at present most of us currently undertaking book-historical investigations
are not truly conversant, much less genuinely adept, in either bibliography
or sociology. Believing that such an emphasis is consonant with McKenzie's

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intentions and achievements, it seems both fitting and constructive to stress
the "and" in the title of the last book he published in his lifetime: Bibliography
and the Sociology of Texts. [34]

Yet, McKenzie himself never developed the sociological program he inaugurated
with the thoroughness that one might have hoped for, so that
Hugh Amory's critique—" `Sociology', so conceived, has . . . apparently, no
methodological content"—must be accepted as an insightful diagnosis.[35] If
the `sociology' in our evolving understanding of the sociology of texts is to
be more than a generalized marker for vague and uncritically examined
notions of social exchange, then perhaps would-be students of book history
would do well to read Anthony Giddens' New Rules of Sociological Method.
Chapter 4, "The Form of Explanatory Accounts," which, among other matters,
treats "[t]he problem of adequacy," is particularly apposite.[36] Generally
speaking, Giddens proposes a model of sociological analysis that focuses on
"the reproduction of practices." Rejecting the simplistic "dualism of `the individual'
and `society'," he understands social structure as "both constituted
by human agency and yet . . . at the same time the very medium of this constitution"
(128-129). Giddens thus attempts to develop a sociological method
that accounts both for individual human beings as purposive agents and for
the larger forms of social life that their actions reproduce and transform.[37]
Giddens' Central Problems in Social Theory (1979) provides an especially
illuminating example of a thoughtfully developed sociological method.[38]

The sociology of texts should begin in the study of the practices and institutions
of textual production, transmission, and reception. Such a sociology
perforce involves the investigation of economic determinants, aesthetic conventions,
and ideological factors as it seeks to understand and interpret the
roles of print in the construction and maintenance of social practices and

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institutions. Books are the products of social processes—sometimes represented
as "the communications circuit" or "the literary field"—and they
participate in social processes far beyond those associated with textual production
and transmission.[39] A sociology of texts should also seek a deeper
understanding of how the practices and institutions of textual production,
transmission, and reception are imbedded in and informed by larger social
and political structures. Moreover, such a sociology must always recognize
that print culture at once instantiates and is instantiated by the larger culture
of which it is a part. Hence, it is sometimes characterized as "an index of
civilisation."[40]

Book historians have already begun to cultivate a sociology of knowledge
and its allied discipline, the history of ideas—surely a hopeful development
indicative of greater things to come from recognizing the usefulness of the
social sciences for the investigation and analysis of the worlds of print.[41]
Some have found the foundational writings of Karl Mannheim enormously
valuable,[42] as are the works of more contemporary scholars, including Stark,
Berger and Luckman, and Merton.[43] Some important work has been done

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too in the sociology of literature, though scholarship in this sub-field is
commonly more uneven in quality, which may help to account for its being
generally less well known.[44]

[30]

"The London Book Trade in the Later Seventeenth Century." Unpublished typescript
of the Sandars Lectures for 1975-76. Distributed privately; copies deposited in the
British Library; the English Faculty Library, Oxford; and the University Library, Cambridge.

[31]

D. F. McKenzie, "Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve," in
Giles Barber and Bernhard Fabian, eds., Buch und Buchhandel in Europa in achtzehnten
Jahrhundert, Wolfenbütteler Schriften zur Geschichte des Buchwesens, Band 4 (Hamburg:
Hauswedell, 1981), pp. 81-125. Reprinted in McKenzie, Making Meaning: "Printers of the
Mind" and Other Essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, S.J. (Amherst and
Boston: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2002), pp. 198-236.

[32]

"Type-Bound Topography," Times Literary Supplement (17 December 1982), 1403;
"The Sociology of the Text: Orality, Literacy and Print in Early New Zealand," Library
6th ser. 6 (1984), 333-365. A revised version was published as Oral Culture, Literacy & Print
in Early New Zealand: The Treaty of Waitangi (Wellington: Victoria Univ. Press, 1985).

[33]

D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, rev. ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), p. 14.

[34]

The resistance of some senior bibliographers to this broader remit is evinced, in
part, in two highly critical reviews of McKenzie's Panizzi Lectures: T. H. Howard-Hill,
Library 6th ser. 10 (1988), 151-158; and G. Thomas Tanselle, "Textual Criticism and
Literary Sociology," Studies in Bibliography 44 (1991), 83-143 [pp. 87-99]. Other scholars
warmly endorsed McKenzie's program—see, for example, Roger Chartier, "Texts, Forms, and
Interpretations," in his On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 81-89.

[35]

Hugh Amory, review of D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts,
The Panizzi Lectures 1985 (London: British Library, 1986) in Book Collector 36 (1987),
411-418 [p. 413].

[36]

Anthony Giddens, New Rules of Sociological Method, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1993), pp. 155-162.

[37]

For critiques of Giddens' method, see Nicos P. Mouzelis, Back to Sociological Theory:
The Construction of Social Orders (London: Macmillan, 1991), a stimulating work in its
own right; and Hans Harbers and Gerard de Vries, "Empirical Consequences of the `Double
Hermeneutic'," Social Epistemology 7 (1993), 183-193 (with comments and replies, 193-211).
More generally, see David Held and John B. Thompson, eds., Social Theory of Modern
Societies: Anthony Giddens and his Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989).

[38]

Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction
in Social Analysis (London: Macmillan, 1979). For a bibliography of works on Giddens'
theories and of studies that use them, see Christopher G. A. Bryant and David Jary, The
Contemporary Giddens (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 287-320.

[39]

For the "communications circuit" in various manifestations, see Darnton, "What
Is the History of Books?," pp. 107-135; Darnton, "Histoire du livre, Geschichte des Buchwesens,"
pp. 33-41; and Adams and Barker, "A New Model for the Study of the Book,"
pp. 5-43. On the "literary field" see Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production:
Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993).
For a productive synthesis involving both of these constructs, see Peter D. McDonald, "Implicit
Structures and Explicit Interactions: Pierre Bourdieu and the History of the Book,"
Library 6th ser. 19 (1997), 105-121. Cf. Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art, 2nd ed.
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 26-48.

[40]

Keith Maslen, "Jobbing Printing and the Bibliographer: New Evidence from the
Bowyer Ledgers," Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin 10 (1977),
4-16 [p. 16]; repr. in Maslen, An Early London Printing House at Work: Studies in the
Bowyer Ledgers (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1993), 139-152 [p. 152]. For
a critique of the concept of print culture, see the first chapter of Joseph A. Dane, The
Myth of Print Culture: Essays on Evidence, Textuality, and Bibliographical Method
(Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2003).

[41]

Among the seminal Anglo-American studies are: Hajo Holborn, "The History of
Ideas," American Historical Review 73 (1968), 683-695; Quentin Skinner, "Meaning and
Understanding in the History of Ideas," History and Theory 8 (1969), 1-53; and Hayden
White, "The Tasks of Intellectual History," The Monist 53 (1969), 606-630. See also Dominick
LaCapra and Stephen L. Kaplan, eds., Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals
and New Perspectives (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982).

[42]

Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge
(1935; repr. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1991), especially pp. 237-280; Mannheim,
Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (1952; repr. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1997), especially "The Problem of a Sociology of Knowledge," pp. 134-190 and "The Interpretation
of `Weltanschauung,' " pp. 33-83; Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of
Culture (1956; repr. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1992). Robert K. Merton's "Karl
Mannheim and the Sociology of Knowledge" in his Social Theory and Social Structure (New
York: Free Press, 1968), pp. 542-562, provides a useful resumé and analysis.

[43]

See Werner Stark, The Sociology of Knowledge: An Essay in Aid of a Deeper Understanding
of the History of Ideas (1958; repr. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1998);
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Harmondsworth:
Penguin. 1967); and Robert K. Merton, "The Sociology of Knowledge," in his
Social Theory and Social Structure, pp. 510-542. James E. Curtis and John W. Petras,
eds., The Sociology of Knowledge: A Reader (London: Duckworth & Co., 1970), is a useful
sourcebook.

[44]

Readers may also wish to consult Robert Escarpit, Sociology of Literature, trans.
Ernest Pick, 2nd ed. (1958; repr. London: Frank Cass, 1971); Janet Wolff, Hermeneutic
Philosophy and the Sociology of Art: An Approach to Some of the Epistemological Problems
of the Sociology of Knowledge and the Sociology of Art and Literature (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1975); Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Philippe Desan, and Wendy Griswold,
eds., "The Sociology of Literature," a special number of Critical Inquiry 14 (1988), 421-589;
and Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art. See also James McLaverty, "The Mode
of Existence of Literary Works of Art: The Case of the Dunciad Variorum," Studies
in Bibliography 37 (1984), 82-105.