The Ethnologists' Bookshop: Bartlett & Welford in 1840s New York

For Gaull, accounting for the contingency of such associations requires a shift of critical focus from "context" to "contiguity," a reordering of the causalities of literacy and cultural influence that "would be synchronic instead of sequential, encircling, affiliating publishers, publications, book and literary history, science and politics, visual and verbal records, records of searches and discoveries on the model of the web, reflecting the way the web is reshaping thought processes and re-organizing knowledge even among the least suspecting" (108; 110). [...]Bartlett solicited (unsuccessfully) John C. Frémont to publish his writings about his military explorations in the Rockies and Great Basin and, from afar, assisted in publishing E. G. Squier's Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley as the first volume the "Contributions to Knowledge Series" by the new Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The American Ethnological Society philosophy and mission published at its founding reflects this consonance of expanding commercial and scientific purpose-one that, in the United States, was connected to the exigencies of national expansionism in the American West Announcing "the promotion of a most important and interesting branch of knowledge, that of Man and the Globe he inhabits," the inaugurating "Preface" printed in the first volume of the AES Transactions is presented in a stream of manifest destinarian rhetoric, finding the global importance of ethnological investigation "to be of daily increasing moment in relation to the commercial and maritime interests of the nation," and proclaiming that, "the artificial barriers that have hitherto divided nations and kept them from a knowledge of each other, are every where seen falling the advance of commerce, and its attendant, civilization" (ix). Reassembling cultural history through the contingencies of ad hoc and ever-shifting networks will not restore to wholeness the dismembered authorial corpus eulogized by Duyckinck; but in recalibrating the associative causalities of commerce and literacy, this approach may bring one closer to the "more accurate genealogy of authorship" imagined by Gaull, illuminating the web of itineraries that connect the book trade on Broadway to the conquest of Mexico, scientific collaboration to financial speculation, and the celebrated author to the anonymous street peddler (108).