The Semiotics of Bibliography

D. F. McKenzie's concept of the sociology of texts is an exploration of the network of relationships revealed by analytical bibliography and leads to book history as an understanding of the socio-economic materials and industries indexed by individual manuscripts or books. The meanings of the bibliographic elements of a document are historical and point to networks that will help us understand how texts were created, replicated, disseminated, and understood in the past. The sociology of texts is not, however, a prescription for editorial work because, among other problems, every new edition indexes a new sociology of texts and cannot replicate or act as surrogate indexing the sociology of any source text. McKenzie understood that fully and edited Congreve as an eclectic text fulfilling authorial intentions. So-called social editing is neither documentary nor sociological, and any appeals to a sociology of texts in support of social text editing is illogical, though social texts may be desirable on other grounds. There are many orientations to text leading to different ways to edit for different purposes; we need to understand both the rationales for and the consequences of each approach.