Over the course or the 1840s, the New York bookshop and publishing firm of Bartlett & Welford emerged as the commercial center of an intellectual enterprise that connected ethnological research and literary commerce to the American expansion in the southwest and Mexico. In 1842, John Russell Bartlett co-founded the American Ethnological Society (AES) with Albert Gallatin, capitalizing on his bookselling network of commercial and scholarly contacts to promote New York as the intellectual center of a growing scientific and literary field. Bartlett's reputation as an ethnological scholar enhanced the standing of Bartlett & Welford as an elite source of rare and antiquarian titles; in turn, as publishers, the firm promoted the AES with the publication and distribution of the first, three volumes of the AES Transactions. Writing to Bartlett in November, 1849, Evert Duyckinck posed a rhetorical question that offered yet another measure of the success of this joint enterprise: "Are not the ethnologists accumulating in Manhattan?" The nature of that research community, however, was both contingent and unstable; by the end of the decade, the network that connected Bartlett & Welford to the AES and the concentration of ethnologists observed by Duyckinck was in decline. Bartlett, having dissolved Bartlett & Welford earlier in 1849, was shortly to be appointed United States Boundary Commissioner to mark the new international border between the United States and the Republic of Mexico--a position that, from his perspective, offered an unprecedented opportunity to conduct original linguistic research among the little-known Native American tribes of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Writing back to Duyckinck in January, 1850, Bartlett predicted, "[i]f I can cam' out [this] scheme ..., I shall be able to do more for American Ethnology, than has been done by any one, not even excepting Humboldt." But Bartlett's scientific ambitions never were fully realized. His controversial decision to concede back to Mexico a substantial portion of the Mesilla Valley of New Mexico led to his vilification in the national press; after nearly three years of work in the field, Congress cut off the his funding, and Bartlett's plan of publishing the complete record of his ethnological findings failed. During his absence in the southwest, the intellectual community Bartlett had helped to cultivate in New York also collapsed. Less than two years after Duyckinck spoke of the ethnologists converging on New York, the Yale linguist William Wadden Turner wrote to Bartlett in New Mexico to inform him that the internationally-famous Ethnological Society that Bartlett co-founded had, "come almost to a stand still," and at best "dragged out a prosaic humdrum sort of existence." The abrupt dissolution of the AES in New York reflects Bartlett's unique and magnetizing qualities. Historicizing the nature of that influence is an exercise of biographical, intellectual, commercial, political, disciplinary, and literary documentation--but one that must assemble, as Bruno Latour has argued in Reassembling the Social, a "tracing of associations" that reveals and incorporates "a type of connection between things that are not themselves social" (5, emphases in text). In her most recent essay on the bookseller and publisher Joseph Johnson, "Joseph Johnson: Webmaster" (2009), Marilyn Gaull offers a model of such a history. Finding in Johnson the prototype of a "webmaster," Gaull suggests that the algorithmic qualities of Johnson's social experience--he belonged to literary circles that begat other literary circles, with shifting memberships, irreconcilable philosophies, and competing registers of power--pose a significant challenge to linear models of literary influence. 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). …