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1pg.+stamped address leaf. To To G & C Merriam, Springfield, Mass.
 

“…several inquiries having been made here for Webster Unabridged Dictionary... I have no doubt that a limited number of them would sell. The English language is now beginning to be very much studied here, in consequence of the presence of the English fleet & army, and the demand for interpreters and also the increased transactions of trade. I should not anticipate however a very large sale for your work at present....send on commission say twenty five copies...and I will...effect their sale if possible.”
 

Harrison Gray Otis Dwight, a Massachusetts clergyman, ordained as a missionary in 1829, spent the ensuing 30 years of his life in Ottoman Turkey as a missionary to the Armenian community. His research about the Christian communities of  Persia and the Caucasus was published by a colleague in 1833, as was his narrative of  Christianity “revived” in the Armenian Church of Turkey, which he himself wrote 20 years later. He returned to America at the start of the Civil War, only to die in a railroad accident.  The “English fleet and army” to which he refers was the British military presence during the Crimean War, which ended days after this letter was written. Webster’s classic Unabridged Dictionary, originally published in 1828, did not receive mass distribution in America until the Merriams published their popular edition in 1848, producing a 1367-page book with a novel “flexible binding” notable for its “durability”, even for export to far-off places like the Turkish Empire.