Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, a burgeoning field of scholarship known as the “history of reading” has developed as a natural extension of the history of print culture and what has come to be known as l’histoire du livre or the history of the book. In some ways, this scholarship is an attempt to shift the focus of attention from the production and circulation of books to their reception and consumption by readers. Like the history of the book, though, the history of reading has for the most part focused near-exclusively on Europe and North America. This essay is a preliminary attempt to fill this gap and bring the history of readers and reading in the non-European world back into focus. It does so by exploring the rise of Armenian printing in the South Asian port city of Madras, where a wealthy Iranian-Armenian merchant from Isfahan had established an Armenian printing press in 1772. The paper briefly touches upon some of the publications that were issued from this press and moves on to examine the printing, on the same press, of the world’s first Armenian-language newspaper, Azdarar (Intelligencer) published from 1794 to 1796. The paper also examines how the growth of Armenian print in Madras was not only part of a larger global Armenian print culture stretching from Amsterdam to Calcutta, but more particularly to how it was intimately connected to developments in Iran where Azdarar had subscribers. Unlike previous scholarship, the paper explores not only the history of printers and printing presses, but also the early modern “history of reading” in Madras. As a case study, it focuses on the reader response of an “ordinary,” semi-literate Armenian reader to an English-language memoir printed in London in 1792 by Joseph Emin, a Calcutta-based Armenian from Hamadan (Iran). To gauge the “reader response” to Joseph Emin’s book, the paper examines several submissions to the “letters to the editor” section of Azdarar in 1795 where an anonymous and barely literate subscriber reports on how a friend had responded to reading Emin’s memoirs. By carefully interpreting an eighteenth century Madras-based reader’s experience of reading Emin’s memoirs of his travels across Europe, Russia, Iran, and India, my study explores the possibility of using a history of reading in the early modern Madras to shed light on the mentalité of the members of the city’s largely Iranian-Armenian community.