This presentation is part of my book project that explores cultures of literacy and social practice, particularly through collecting practices, a place where historians rarely venture to study the epistemological keys of understanding the dynamics of state formation. I chart a ‘civilizing process’ in early-modern Isfahan reliant on the production and dissemination of pedagogical manuals on proper etiquette, conduct and manners to regulate social behavior and emotional expression. Manuals, created through literacy, a cultural know-how that had to be studied and embodied by refined subjects of the city of Isfahan. To be in style one spoke poetry and moved with the gestures set out in codes of adab, or etiquette. Adab literacy heightened practices of seeing, reading, writing and collecting. As Isfahanis came to cultivate adab, their distinct subjectivities and levels of literacy were shaped by these practices. It is within this context that I will consider the disciplinary work this civilizational project performed on the medium of communicating social relations.