"One of the most fertile developments in book history in recent years has been the study of the connections between books and the social contexts in which they originated and were used. This social turn is linked closely with the inaugural Panizzi lectures given in the British Library by Don McKenzie in 1985. In this landmark series, entitled 'Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts', McKenzie challenged a traditional view that bibliography is concerned only with signs written or printed on paper or vellum, and not with their meaning. Rather, he proposed, bibliography should comprehend 'not only the technical but the social processes' of the transmission of texts, 'the human motives and interactions which texts involve at every stage of their production, transmission, and consumption'. In short, it should take account of 'the role of human agents'"--