For the past quarter-century substantial research has been done on the ‘House of Wisdom’ (Bayt al-?ikma) at the court of the early Abbasid caliphs up to and prominently including al-Ma’m?n (d. 218/833) (Balty-Guesdon 1992; Gutas 1998; Gutas & van Bladel 2009). At first sight, it might therefore appear foolhardy to propose yet another exploration of this seemingly all too well-trodden ground. Yet long-held misconceptions, by which the Abbasid office of recordkeeping and information, to suggest an alternative rendering, is cast as a center of Graeco-Arabic translation or more grandiosely, a kind of proto-academy of science have stubbornly withstood the challenge of even the most unambiguous evidence. Thus there would seem to be room for fresh scrutiny of the all too scant testimony provided by contemporaneous reports and secondary later narratives. It will be shown that whatever brief governed the presumed ‘House of Wisdom’ during its short existence, the activities associated with it and the—intermittent—caliphal support of them did not succeed in giving it exemplary character in collective memory. This bald assertion is derived from the witness of authors such as al-J??i?, ?unayn b. Is??q, al-Mas??d?, al-Muqaddas?, al-Nad?m, al-Qif??, and b. a. U?aybi?a. In addition to the evolving standard lexicon concerning ‘libraries,’ ‘salons,’ and ‘colleges,’ in which the Abbasid ‘House of Wisdom’ manifestly did not survive, the cumulative evidence provided by the writers just named supports the following conclusions: bibliophily, which gave rise to sizeable collections during the third and fourth/ninth and tenth centuries, was not restricted to courtly circles. It was wealthy administrators and professionals whose demand lead to the post-Ma’m?nid flowering of the rightly so-called translation movement. Finally, venues of scholarly exchange and debate and institutions of higher education developed at a considerable time-lag and independently of caliphal initiative. The rare attestations of ‘houses of wisdom’ in later sources refer to places in distant, barely apprehensible regions and periods.