Ottoman manuscript libraries teem with personal poetic miscellanies (mecmua) from all periods but these have hardly received scholarly attention except as vessels that may contain variants of a sought-after poem. However, studying any particular miscellany as a “moment” in its own right can be greatly rewarding for a historian of literacy and reading. Paying attention to the choice of poems and poets, juxtaposition of different pieces, page layout and orthographical peculiarities can help us reach conclusions about the poetic taste of the compiler and his social milieu. At the same time, we may attain clues as to his motivations for compiling such a miscellany and the kind of use he made of it. Why would a sixteenth-century Ottoman lover of poetry collect poems and write them down? Because he liked them and was likely to desire reading them again? And would he “read” as we moderns do, as a passive consumer/receiver seeking aesthetic pleasure? An examination of a series of personal poetic mecmuas from the period has shown that in most cases the compiler of the mecmua himself was a practicing poet, and not just a “reader”. One often comes across poems by the compiler (“poem by this poor one”) among material by others. It seems that the main motivation for the compilers was to collect material that could be used to create new poems. Juxtaposition of items similar from a compositional point of view (same rhyme word, same metaphor, etc.) suggests that, like motif books used by artists and craftsmen, poetic miscellanies served to build up the compiler’s "copia" in the Renaissance sense of the term. They can, indeed, be compared to medieval and Renaissance commonplace books, which provided readied formulaic material for the rhetor/author’s convenience. Variations on a conventional stock of tropes, rhymes and especially redifs are the chief “spolia” to be garnered from the poems recorded. In other words, poems are thought of as modular assemblages that can be segmented back into their (reusable) elements. The mecmuas studied, therefore, point to a world where the “reader” and “author” functions have not yet become separate. This impression is born out by the biographical dictionaries of the period, where we find that the audience receiving one’s verse was mainly made up of other poets and not a passively consuming audience of an anonymous nature.