Launched in early Nasserist era, the project of Cultural Palaces and Houses aimed to provide Egypt’s population with an easy access to culture framed as a service from the State. However, the institution that supervises today over 300 cultural establishments and employs thousands of people is regularly targeted for its presumed failure to do so, as evidenced by many establishments being either closed down or in a poor state of repair. It is common to blame the failure of Cultural Palaces on the fact that they are run by civil servants and not the professionals of culture, such as writers, artists or painters. Indeed, in the context of dwindling State budget for culture and the expanding private sector in cultural production and sociability, state-owned Cultural Palaces became dependent on informal literary communities in organizing the events, attracting the audience, and placing them on Cairo’s urban map of literature. This presentation centers a specific group of agents who play a key role in running Cultural Palaces in Cairo: the directors of literary clubs (andiya’ al-adab). A bureaucratic entity attached to Cultural Palaces whose functioning is regulated by the General Administration of Cultural Palaces (GACP), literary clubs are run by literary-minded citizens without a formal attachment to the State, or, in other words, “writers, not civil servants”. Instead of the State, the heads of literary clubs draw their resources from their active participation in Cairo’s literary communities and the ability to create an affluence (hashd), which features as the statistical measure of failure or success of Egypt’s cultural bureaucracy. Based on a long-term ethnographic fieldwork in four Cultural Palaces conducted between 2017 and 2022 in Cairo, this presentation explores state-society boundary by attending to concrete forms of relations between civil servants and the heads of literary clubs, marked by cooperation, conflict, negotiations over zones of influence, and constantly shifting power balance.