This paper examines songbooks published between the 1870s and 1920s by a small but active music publishing scene in Cairo and Alexandria. I have named these publications ‘songbooks’ as they feature collections of lyrics of vocal forms, including muwashshah, dawr, mawwāl, qasῑda, ṭaqṭuqa, nashīd and sung marches. As relatively unused sources, they reveal a live repertoire never placed on commercial records, as well as a connection between a nascent entertainment scene and a cottage print industry on Cairo’s Mohammad Ali Street. Song collections provide an alternative source for the study of aesthetic trends within popular entertainment but also provide evidence for the significance of sung practice as one of the sites of formation of a shared national culture. Their presence increased the circulation of a popular repertoire, from a word of mouth to something physically shareable - crucially before the emergence of the mass record industry. This forces us to rethink conceptions of musical literacy in their potential as pedagogical or performance props as well as a silent way to engage with poetry. My work shows that content broadened from derivations of older theoretical treatises and semi-pedagogical texts to something more reflective of a hobbyist interest in the commercial scene. It also reveals the divergences of interest in the ṭarab (musical ecstasy or engagement) aesthetic within a fast changing urban recreational scene. Music publishing represents the bridging between elite and non-elite claims over the definition of ‘local’ Egyptian musical culture. Books were often a result of the network shared between musicians, publishers, print presses, teachers, song-makers (composers, lyricists etc), instrument-makers and musicologists. For readers, books were a way to claim knowledge not of the songs themselves but of the culture of music-making, including through visual media like photographs and engravings of relevant artists and instruments. The gender and class implications of this are significant of course at a time of increasing access for women musicians and listeners. This work therefore contributes both to Arabic music historiography, but also to the emergent field of popular culture studies of the Middle East and Mediterranean during the late Ottoman Empire. In terms of methodology, I bring my performance insight into analyses of the content organisation, song selections and prefaces of the works as well as their implications on the ways that texts might have informed existing performance and pedagogies.