This paper examines the interplay between art, print culture, and entertainment by considering the important role that printed images—namely engraved portraits, landscapes, cityscapes, “exotic” imagery, and myriad other illustrations—as popular forms of visual amusement amongst Arabic-speaking residents of nineteenth-century eastern Mediterranean cities. New kinds of printed images, produced using a variety of technologies, began to increasingly appear in Arabic books and periodicals published at regional presses. Many of these engraved images appeared in literary-scientific journals that strove to popularize modern science and culture. These journals typified the regional nineteenth century conceptions of the arts and sciences as interconnected and universal fields of inquiry and exemplified what contemporary sources perceived of as the modern age. Through such journals, middle-class Arabic-speaking residents of Ottoman cities like Beirut and Cairo debated and promoted “modern” views on science, technology, art, history, and culture during the period of the Arab nahda. The earliest of these journals, printed in Beirut and Cairo from the 1870s onwards, included al-Jinan (The Gardens), al-Muqtataf (The Selections), and al-Hilal (The Crescent). While these journals focused on articles and reports, which were usually translated into Arabic from American, British, and French popular science and literary journals, these Arabic publications also featured engravings for popular consumption. The use of engraved blocks (from local and European sources) heralded new forms of visual literacy that altered customary views on pictorial representation. The printed images helped to turn Arabic periodicals into both visual compendiums of popularized encyclopedic knowledge and sites of pictorial entertainment for a general readership. Scholars of Middle Eastern history locate these periodicals as important markers of regional perspectives on modernity, cultural progress, and social reform. However, while considerable attention is paid to these journals’ articles, their engravings remain largely unexplored. This paper will turn to a close analysis of these printed images as novel forms of visual entertainment and populist artistic expression at a time when other artistic practices, such as oil painting and photography, were gaining traction in the region. The study will also consider how such pictorial modes were being negotiated alongside the varied and shifting views on al-funun (the arts). These printed images thus allow for a consideration of how painting, photography, and printing were interconnected and what that meant for new perspectives on technology, popular entertainment, and visuality.