For centuries, the vast Ottoman post station network that connected Crimea to Cairo and Belgrade to Baghdad served imperial couriers and officials exclusively, providing lodging, meals, and horses as they delivered everything from imperial decrees and villagers’ petitions to intelligence reports. Yet, there are few written records of post station operations until after the 1690s, when an empire-wide reform of the Ottoman post station system generated an unprecedented volume of postal operations records. Among this avalanche of new documentation is the Post Station Register (menzil defteri), which collated discrete fiscal data of every single post station in the empire and listed them according to their geographical location along the routes plied by imperial couriers. Previous scholars have extracted financial data within these registers in order to shed light on postal system usage and the changing volume of communications-related traffic. Nevertheless, there are pertinent methodological challenges to the scholar interested in using its numerical data, as it is not clear if the general trend of increased expenses and courier traffic across time reflects a real increase on the ground, or merely a more aggressive administrative attitude towards recording and reporting expenses. This paper approaches this same historical source with a different methodology. Using genre theory, it asks a different question of the Post Station Register: what kinds of new information did the late seventeenth-century Ottoman fiscal scribe want to know? And what does this new information tell us about the Ottoman bureaucratic logic or mentalité? By closely analyzing MAD 4030, an early example of a Post Station Register, this paper delineates the Ottoman fiscal bureaucracy’s novel attempt to bring its sprawling imperial postal system under separate management. Whereas previously, the postal system had been indirectly administrated through the empire’s taxation system, as evidenced by its records in tax registers, after the 1690s, the postal system was ‘peeled’ away and managed autonomously, and the emergence of the Post Station Register is the tangible evidence of this administrative reorganization.