Throughout the 20th century, the history of the Arabic novel has played out in a complex social field defined by the tensions between modernist aesthetics and nationalist politics. Readerships, markets and bestsellers are rarely - and reluctantly - acknowledged as central dimensions of the novel’s circulation as a modern literary genre. The critical backlash, in Egypt, against Ala al-Aswani’s Yacoubian Building (2002) is a fascinating case in point. This paper will reach back to the beginning of the 20th century to explore the emerging market for fiction in Egypt as a “scandalous’ field of material and symbolic production caught up in a nexus of competing cultural pressures: a courtly literary system in deep flux, the growth of an urban “middle-brow” readership, nascent nationalist regimes of moral and social utility, and the intense public appetite for translated “foreign” fictions. The paper will focus on Khalil Sadiq Efendi’s fiction serial The People’s Entertainments (Musamarat al-sha’b 1904-1911). Sadiq was keen on casting his literary enterprise as a service to the nation, and he constantly editorialized about the noble and didactic function of novels. On the other hand, he was also an astute businessman and equally invested in promoting the idea of a thriving marketplace in which literature would circulate as a commodity much like any other. Sadiq resolved the evident tension between these two poles – and tried to forestall his highbrow critics – by constructing a liberal literary discourse based in the ambiguous idea of profit, simultaneously moral, social and economic. While nineteenth century Paris is regularly rehearsed as the emblem of urban capitalist modernity in the adapted melodramas and thrillers published in The People’s Entertainments, a corrupt fin de siècle Cairo continually haunts this ‘other’ social geography in a narrative act of recognition, affiliation and auto-critique. The question of literature as public good and private commodity will be examined against the backdrop of contemporary practices of translation and adaptation, and these highly controversial rewritings of metropolitan “imagined geographies” into early Arabic language fictions.