For the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), which was founded in London 1804 as a Christian publishing mission, the Middle East held special prestige as the “Holy Land” and the lands of the Bible. Thus the region became an important focus of the society’s work, beginning with efforts in Malta in 1817 that expanded into Anatolia, the Levant, and beyond. Drawing upon the archives of the BFBS, which are now stored at Cambridge University Library, this paper will consider how the BFBS transformed evangelical nostalgia for the “Bible lands” into the creation of a center for the modern global Bible trade. The society did so by making Port Said, in the Suez Canal Zone, a hub for worldwide distribution of its imprints. By 1926, for example, when the BFBS touted available Bible translations in “579 forms of human speech”, the “Bible Lands Agency” offices in Port Said were coordinating sales of Bibles from Zanzibar to Jerusalem, and were facilitating sales by associated agencies as far afield as Japan. Its local colporteurs in Port Said were also selling Bibles to sailors, tourists, refugees, and aspiring emigrants whose ships came into harbor. Annual figures for the Bible Lands Agency’s harbor sales in languages like Malagasy, Armenian, and Thai, as well as in Arabic, Hebrew, and Urdu, give some sense of the flow of world history that passed through the region. In short, this paper connects the study of the “Bible lands” in modern times with the overlapping histories of printing, literacy, and the book; British imperialism; maritime transport; and migration. At the same time, it places Egypt and the “Bible Lands” at the center of what some scholars are now calling “globalizing Christianity”.