Using the circle as an analytical category permits a reading of premodern Islamic cosmological treatises that gives primacy to the visual and spatial over the textual, allowing us a sideways approach to ‘reading’ a work, not for its text or its narrative illustrations, but for its schematic diagrammes of the cosmos. The concentric circles from which the visual diagramme of the cosmos is constructed gives the viewer insight into the conceptualisation of the world and our place in it, not only reflecting the visual culture of terrestrial and celestial spatiality but also bringing into focus the materiality and production of the manuscripts themselves – how were the diagrammes constructed, with what tools, and what aesthetic preferences do they evince? As the conceptual construction of the cosmos in illustrated versions of al-Qazwini ?Aj??ib al-makhl?q?t wa-ghar??ib al-mawj?d?t relies heavily on the circle, this paper will examine the reception and circulation of the early modern ?Aj??ib al-makhl?q?t manuscript tradition through the Persianate world, focusing on the patronage and adaptation of cosmological diagrammes in illustrated manuscripts from 16th-19th century in Iran and South Asia and their later adaptation and circulation in lithographs printed from the mid-19th century. The continuity of visual style and conceptualisation of the cosmos in these mass-produced and widely circulated lithographs adapted from the larger ?Aj??ib al-makhl?q?t tradition brings into question the link between the introduction of printing technologies and the rupture that colonial modernity caused to Islamic knowledge production. Not only does the adaption of the schema of the premodern cosmos into lithographs challenge the disenchantment of modernity brought about by the spread of literacy and print and the ascendency of Islamic reformism in the 19th-century, but it also raises the question of how images circulated, and how this concentric vision of the cosmos was received by audiences as the volume of lithograph copies multiplied and became available throughout the Middle East and South Asia. The presence of these mass-produced not-quite-manuscripts raises a number of questions that will be addressed in the conclusion to this paper, namely, how and why did this premodern visual culture of the cosmos continue to circulate so widely in an era of reformism and modernity? How was it read and interpreted, and how does the continued circulation of these diagrammes (and the accompanying weltanschauung in which they are situated) bring into question the notion of a rupture with a premodern and precolonial past?