By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, technological breakthroughs in steam travel not only led to the integration of the Ottoman Empire into the world economy but also came to create a vibrant commodity market at home where the Ottoman consumers had gained a better access to a range of cheaper and more reliable goods. The Ottoman state had grown rather anxious to regulate these commodity flows since the 1860s, and often did so by drafting regulations that tried to police the ever-faster travel of goods, ideas, and individuals within and across its borders. The printing press—a commodity limited to the bureaucratic realm at the beginning of the nineteenth century—gradually became more accessible and affordable in the latter part of the nineteenth century as well. This was when it began to form illicit connections and questionable markets, often at the service of ‘suspicious’ political and economic ends, at least in the eyes of the Ottoman bureaucrats. While the existing scholarship has vigorously analyzed the Hamidian practices of censorship, one understudied regulative measure has been the politics that surrounded the print commodity market in general, and that of moveable type in particular. This paper addresses that gap by framing the Hamidian interventions into the Ottoman literary space from the analytic angle of commodities and resources. To do so, I illustrate how the Ottoman state came to regard the printing press as a strategic commodity that required close inspection and surveillance, and examine the attempts of Istanbul to monopolize and centralize the production of moveable type, and regulate its secondhand exchange. It was through such interventions into commodity markets that the Hamidian state tried to regulate the limits of social imagination, and eliminate any alternatives to the official modernity.