Since the 1979 Revolution, political reformers, intellectuals, and readers have turned to theories of Western social science and philosophy as a resource for potential sociopolitical change, even as such topics have become the site of government sensitivity. While the striking popularity of Western social science has caught the attention of academics, journalists, and politicians alike, their analyses of these texts’ popularity hinges on an underlying belief in the causal efficacy of texts, whereby the content of a text has an autonomous meaning that directly shapes the intellect of readers (and explains the rise of democratic movements.) In this view, a physical text is conceived to be only a single token of an abstract type. The materiality of the text as a book, as well as the book’s mode of production and material routes of circulation, are presumed to have no bearing on its reception. This talk interrogate these assumptions by arguing that the movement of ideas is inseparable from the multiple processes of mediation involved in the circulation of a text in book form. In particular, I examine the social practices of the production and dissemination, focusing on the material infrastructures that enable the movements of texts. I demonstrate how textual circulation is created and mediated by human agents rather than autonomous texts. Furthermore, a close examination of book production in Iran demonstrates how seemingly infinite publics are in fact limited by the material objects that are necessary to their formation, thus; I focus on seemingly mundane material concerns that bear on the text-centered decisions of Iranian publishers, especially their preoccupation with the physical properties of books. I demonstrate how texts become politically and socially salient in contemporary Iran not only because of their content, but also because of their material form and physical modes of production and circulation.