In the middle of the seventeenth century, a few Ottoman intellectuals began writing instructions to hopeful authors as to how to write a book. These treatises explained to authors all the necessary components of a book from providing the identity of the author and title of the book to including a table of contents. Over time, these instructions were translated from Arabic into Turkish and began circulating in the margins and ends of notebooks as useful reminders for future writers. In this paper, I survey and examine the relatively rare phenomenon in which authors, readers, and copyists began to reflect explicitly on the formal components of a book. It focuses on what components of a book were deemed absolutely necessary to the act of writing. In particular, it examines the emphasis on identifying authorship and attempts to tie this development to a crisis in authorship in the seventeenth century as a growing vernacular lay-reading culture led to a large number of falsely attributed or anonymous works. Authors and readers attempted to establish authorship by emphasizing the formal components of books, writing new bibliographies, and new writing practices. Scholars have often defined manuscript cultures negatively, as a simple lack of print. This paper is an initial examination of some of the practices and techniques of writing, authorship, and book production that allowed manuscripts to flourish in the Middle East until well into the nineteenth century. Through a finer grasp of these practices, we can better understand or question the singularity of print.