Lebanon’s pre-civil war ethos is, in popular culture, nostalgically referenced as a site of decadent highlife and unrestrained capital endeavor. The adage of “Beirut: Paris of the Middle East” serves to position Lebanon’s geopolitical neighbors as its opposite and, following the official end of the country’s 15-year civil war, as a lofty goal in service to the country’s future reflective and external images. The adage of “Beirut: Paris of the Middle East” serves to position Lebanon’s geopolitical neighbors as its opposite and, following the official end of the country’s 15-year civil war, as a lofty goal in service to the country’s future reflective and external images. Faced with both the question of how to rehabilitate a fractured society and competitively enter into the cosmopolitan, geopolitical arena of nation-states, images of the country pre-war took on a new significance in providing an idealized image of not only the country’s past, but its potential future. By looking at the recent uptick in production of so-called popular “coffee table photography books”, this project seeks to consider the ways in which visual pre-war narratives are collected, circulated, and consumed. Given the multiplicity of narratives of, and claims to, the Lebanese state, this paper will take seriously the role of popular media-as-consumer-goods in grappling with and shaping historical narratives and present realities. What appeals to consumers about such books? Do such commodities work to draw a disparate nation—whose diaspora far outnumbers its residents—together, or does interacting with such visualizations of pre-war life fossilize a past that cannot be retrieved? Considering the process of production in its whole, I aim to study these commodities as the sum of each stage of their production, from sources and photo captions to final ownership of these books. With the dearth of official state narratives in mind, I also consider the role of the book-as-archive, and posit the following questions as the foundation of my research aims: how are these highly curated images naturalized in their place in a larger collection? Does ownership of such collections of photographs constitute a purchasable archive in which the individual is able to project herself into the ethos on offer? And, given the popularity of such books as gifts, what sorts of work do these mini-archives do to create, and elaborate on, postmemory as it is inherited between generations?