The urban history of Tehran has usually been told either from the perspective of state building and modernization or from the perspective of changing aesthetic norms and architectural history. The history of the urban experience itself, and the emergence of new modes of social and cultural life associated with the form of the modern city, has by contrast less often been explored. This paper will investigate the experience of urban modernity from the vantage point of the rapid transformation of one specific urban institution: the bookstore. By investigating the history of bookstores in Tehran during the first half of the twentieth century, the paper will highlight the intersection of several distinct social and cultural transformations that were taking place in Tehran during that time. First, the paper will investigate the discernable patterns in the location of newly built bookstores, charting their growth from the traditional commercial zones of the Tehran bazaar to newly built commercial zones of the expanding city. Second, the paper will also link the growth of bookstores to the social growth of a new literate class of Iranians produced as a result of the educational policies of the first half of the twentieth century. These educational policies led to the growth a new class of modern readers who, for the first time, engaged in the practice of buying, reading, and trading of books on an unprecedented scale. Finally, the paper will also survey the role of modern print technology during this period, and the important possibilities that the new mass-production techniques of typeset printing enabled with respect to transforming the patterns of book circulation, as well as the experience of reading itself. As the paper will argue, it is the intersection of all three of these factors—new sites of bookstores, a new class of readers, and the possibilities of mass production—that contributed to the emergence of Tehran’s “public sphere” by mid-century. As books and readers began to share a common space within the urban experience of the city via modern bookstores, new possibilities of public opinion and political action also began to take shape. The source material for the paper is derived primarily from a growing body of published histories and memoirs of specific Tehrani bookstores and their owners, as well as the histories and memoirs associated with specific book publishers.