21
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- Author's quote: ...it is reasonable to estimate that this one peddler was selling about 25,000 books to farmers each year...by the early 1800's there were thousands of peddlers.
- The book then asserts that Weems was selling these volumes "door-to-door in the rural areas of the South" to individual "farmers."
- Author's quote: ...some [book] peddlers also stocked clandestine works'" and therefore, "if local stores would not supply occult publications to American farmers, book peddlers were there to fill the need.
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- The author miscites his source, doubles the cited figure, and conflates book peddlers with all peddlers.
- The author attempts to portray a wholesaler supplying multiple bookstores as representative of one of thousands of wandering book peddlers. He again seeks to bolster his absurd claim that multiple occult texts were easily available in New England in the 1800s.
- Peddlers of occult books on the frontier?
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- J. R. Dolan, The Yankee Peddlers of Early America (New York: Bramhall House, 1964).
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26-27
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- "Disorderly Persons" "all jugglers [conjurors], and all persons pretending to have skill in physiognomy, palmistry, or like crafty science, or pretending to tell fortunes, or to discover lost goods."
- (italics added, the amendation of "conjurors" is the author's)
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- The author wants the reader to read "juggler" as "conjurer," i.e. as a practitioner of magic. In context, it is clear that those referred to are those who attempt to extract money from others by deceit, not the practice of 'magic.'
- Jugglers or conjurors?
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- Laws of the State of New-York, Revised and Passed at the Thirty-Sixth Session of the Legislature (Albany: Southwick, 1813), 1:114
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