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whereas Habermas’s misuse of Mead comes in for special censure (pp. 56–58). Yet surely either such upshot reifies and re-inscribes the traditional, determinate notion of authorship otherwise chipped away by The Politics of the Book.Where, then, does appreciating the distributed agency and materiality involved in bookmaking get us? Why is either feature of the bookmaking process important? Notably, The Politics of the Book is invested in bringing highfalutin theorizing back down to earth. Carreira da Silva and Brito Vieira reject the idea of “‘theory’ as an abstract, disembodied, purely cognitive affair” (p. 12). To some extent, Political Vocabularies shares in this aim: Condren cautions that political theorists are frequently so preoccupied with the “grander” part of the world of language and ideas that they make unreliable “guide[s]” to the “whole” (p. 168). Theory tends to be too narrow an enterprise, ignoring the body in favor of the mind or the many in favor of the few. Yet insofar as The Politics of the Book leaves the significance of its own intervention opaque, it exacerbates the unfortunate perception that theory is irrelevant. Given its view of politics as a battle over language and written at a time when theory is all too often already marginalized, this has the curious effect of undermining the very project The Politics of the Book frames itself as advancing.