This chapter offers a critical engagement with the official discourse on Dhaka, which I term the “city of the book.” By analysing newspaper city pages, tourist brochurestourist brochures, and real estate promotional materials, it traces the images and imaginaries that the official narrative endorses and perpetuates. The city that emerges from these authoritative accounts circulates the dominant urban imaginary that is stagnant and regressive, marked by excessive lionisation of the past—a tendency that impedes the formation of a distinctive vision for the city’s future. It is also perilously synecdochical as it substitutes a part of the city for the whole. The repetitive presence and overemphasis on the visible, replicable, calculable, and commercially profitable physical properties marginalise or completely negate the lived city and its intangible associations, gradually making way for a fatal transposition of those selective properties as the city itself.