<p>The role of printing and the press has been famously designated by Benedict Anderson (1991) as being one of the major motors for the rise of the bourgeois state in the nineteenth century. Such a pervasive argument has led revisionists to declaim the beliefs of many new nations that their state is a revived entity, re-emerging after the end of occupation and the arrival of democratic self-rule. However, the peculiar case of Bulgaria, and the various books published and occasionally printed before mass literacy that have been retrospectively claimed by nationalist historians as belonging to their nation, were produced under circumstances that include elements of proto-nationalism somewhat different to the situations of countries like Italy and Belgium. The following article assesses the “Bulgarianness” of the books produced by three bookmen—Stanislavov, Zhefarovic and Paisiy Hilendarski—arguing that religious and linguistic persecution means that their artefacts were certainly antagonistic to either Ottoman or Greek domination in State and Church, and that these men can be seen as being at least proto-Nationalists in their roles.</p>