ABSTRACT
There is perhaps no better example of textual transaction than the interlinguistic exchanges that enabled the modern incarnations of Alf layla wa layla, known most widely in English as the Arabian Nights. As a text-or, rather, a series of texts-of uncertain origin, translated numerous times and produced as a book in edition after edition over the course of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tracing the variegated uses of the text in different social and historical contexts can be a bewildering task. To follow the thread of the modern Nights, even limiting oneself to its use as a printed book, takes one from the libraries of royal courts, to educational and cultural institutions, the offices of newspapers and periodicals and down alleyways to back-street printing houses publishing pamphlets and cheap books for expanding markets of readers.1 The transformation of this group of tales into a coherent text, organized, printed, and consumed in an expanding market for books, is rather remarkable. This is especially so considering that these narratives represent what in the pre-modern and early modern Arabic context would be considered a rather minor, popular, literary arena, despite evidence of its longevity in the region.2
