Within a few short years between 1815 and 1820, Muslims began printing books across a sequence of distant but no less connected cities, including Calcutta, Cairo, Tabriz, Lucknow and Saint Petersburg. Within a less than two year period, between 1817 and 1819, the first Muslim works were printed in Iran, Egypt and Awadh, three states on the edges of European expansion. In each of the major early cases, Muslim printing occurred on outreach points of European empires and their industrializing products by way of presses, type, and paper. These latter commodities were able to move beyond the political frontiers of empires through the closer contacts forged in this period between Europeans and Iranian, Indian and Arab Muslims. In several of the major cases, we are able to precisely identify the social sequence of knowledge transmission between Christian printer and Muslim journeyman, a word used here in both its senses of ‘apprentice printer’ and ‘traveller.’ This sense of religious identities is important in recognizing the religious dimensions of this print-mediated encounter, since in many cases printing’s first contact was brokered through evangelical Christian organizations and their Muslim helpers or respondents. The locations of the transmission of printing to Muslims (London, Calcutta, Saint Petersburg, Singapore) were therefore not only global nodes of contact, but also missionary centers and evangelical outreach points. Moving from the technological to the textual sphere, the actual content of early Muslim printed works in turn echo the increasingly interpenetrating spheres of Muslim and Christian dialogue, whether in the 1814 Arabic response to Anglican Christianity that Jawad ibn Sabat printed in Calcutta, the Arabic-Italian dictionary that was the first product of the Bulaq press in Cairo, or the Jihadnama against the Russians that was the first Muslim-printed book from Iran. Yet the interplay of evangelicalism and empire were only two factors in the process: the third was industrialization. And it is in this respect that the first Muslim presses need to be placed in a larger global context of the spread of printing in the Americas and Australasia during the same years. It is in this respect that the pioneering Muslim presses are conceivable as ‘frontier presses’ in the same sense as the portable presses carried to the expanding frontiers of America and Australasia.