McKenzie 1986

The book as an expressive form

Walter Greg: "What the bibliographer is concerned with is pieces of paper or parchment covered with certain written or printed signs. With these signs he is concerned merely as arbitrary marks; their meaning is no business of his" (qtd on 1)

using C. S. Peirce (Ross Atkinson), could argue signs in book for a bibliographer are merely:

• iconic: representative, referential -- textual, descriptive and enumerative bibliography treat signs as miniature portraits of the whole
• or indexical: point at something else; causal; printing acts like this for analytic bibliography -- the signs point to an order of printing, etc.
• Atkinson's model doesn't account for history

as soon as one is "required to explain signs in a book, ... they assume a symbolic status" (2)

we need history now more than ever -- with the rise of history of the book, all bibliography is becoming historical bibliography (3) (Greg's definition above now too limited)

new principle/definition: "bibliography is the discipline that studies texts as recorded forms, and the processes of their transmission, including their production and reception" (4)

• "bibliographers should be concerned to show that forms effect meaning" (4)
• not only technical but social processes of text's transmission (4)
• what McKenzie's really doing: turning bibliography into history of the book

bibliography: "the study of the sociology of texts" (5)

broad definition of texts; includes maps, prints, music; "verbal, visual, oral, and numeric data" (5)

etymology of "text": weaving, materials woven together; "the primary sense is one which defines a process of material construction. It creates an object, but is not peculiar to any one substance or any one form" (6)

etymology of "sociology": bringing social component, human interactions and motives, back into study of textual transmission; "alerts us to the roles of institutions, and their own complex structures, in affecting the forms of social discourse, past and persent" (7)

bibliography's connection with New Criticism; "scientific" status of bibliography; confined the book, put it in a vacuum (7-8)

• has impeded bibliography as a discipline; neglected human agency

interested in looking at the non-verbal elements of the book as expressive

Wimsatt and Beardsley's "Intentional Fallacy"; historians of the book can never avoid author-audience dynamic

"each reading is peculiar to its occasion, each can be at least partially recovered from the physical forms of the text, and the differences i nreadings constitute an informative history. What writers thought they were doing in writing texts, or printers and booksellers in designing and publishing them, or readers in making sense of them are issues which no history of the book can evade." (10)