The invention of lithography in the 19th century allowed for the continuation of manuscript culture and its visual conventions in the Islamic world. The central role of the scribe and the work of the illuminator and illustrator stayed the same, and new players such as publishers (chapchi) and wholesalers were added to this network. Publishers attempted to maintain the close resemblance between printed books and textual artifacts, but they gradually reshaped their approaches to production in accordance with their own particular choices and the expectations of audiences. In Persianate culture, particularly in Iran, and among the lithographed reproductions of iconic Persian literature, the work of poet Sheykh Moṣleḥ al-Din Saʿdi Shirazi (d. 1291) reveals a specific range of evolution in terms of content, layout, format, and picture cycles. The poet’s great literary merit, which inspired the creation of several illustrated and illuminated manuscripts, led to the particular conventions in producing manuscripts on Saʿdi’s works. While the first lithographed versions of his works imitated the originals in term of format, layout, and the order of content, the later printed works of the book (in the format of the entire Kolliyāt, single books of Golestān, and anthologies) reveal innovations that depart from old conventions. How can these differences help reconstruct the social and economic context in which these books were created? What light does the study of these deviations from old conventions shed on the reception of Saʿdi’s works when the audience shifted from a privileged few to a much broader group of people? The proposed paper will first explore how the format and contents were shaped in the first lithographed printed books of Saʿdi produced in Tehran, Tabriz, and Bombay between 1851 and 1874. Then it will chronologically trace changes made to the work in response to later social and economic conditions. To this end, through a comparative analysis of early lithographed versions of Kolliyāt and their manuscript counterparts, I will assess the continuum of manuscript tradition. In the next section, I will analyse margin annotations (sharḥ dar ḥāshieh) printed in newer lithographed versions of Golestān and examine the later tradition of writing comprehensive motivational notes—what producers defined as taꜥriż—at the end of the book. Through this analysis the paper will seek to reconstruct the cultural context(s) and practices that both shaped and reshaped lithographed versions of the book.