FROM ART TO COMMODITY: PRINT CULTURE AND THE TEHRAN BAZAAR

Iranian print culture had already undergone significant changes by the time of the 1906–11 Constitutional Revolution. As others have detailed, the older scribal tradition was significantly affected by the adoption of lithography as the standard method of textual reproduction.Footnote ¹³ Although textual reproduction via moveable type was known in Iran during the 19th century, for practical, economic, and aesthetic reasons it was the lithographic method that became most commonly used for reproducing printed materials.Footnote ¹⁴

The proliferation of lithography had important implications for the history of Iranian print. On the broadest level, it accelerated a transformation in the relationship between producers and consumers of texts. In the premodern manuscript tradition, this relationship was premised upon social–cultural assumptions that closely resembled systems of literary and artistic patronage; commissioned books were reproduced by hand, and the aesthetic features of script and illumination were often the prized elements of a text.Footnote ¹⁵ When combined with a low level of literacy and the absence of large-scale public libraries, the high cost of producing these individual works of book-art meant that ownership of them was generally restricted to institutions concerned with the reproduction of religious knowledge—madrasas and khānqāhs—and to the libraries of aristocratic patrons of high culture.Footnote ¹⁶

Lithography's growing popularity set in motion a gradual change in the social–cultural understanding of books. While the aesthetic appeal of script and illumination remained an important ideal, the capacity of lithography to produce larger print-runs—by some estimates up to eight hundred copies of a given work—redefined the relationship between producers and consumers of printed materials.Footnote ¹⁷ More specifically, the personal relationship between patrons of texts and their artists/scribes gave way to a growing social separation between producers and consumers, which was endemic to textual commodification. The status of texts also changed. New technologies diminished what Walter Benjamin described as the “aura” of texts, causing them to be removed from the broad category of art and reclassified as merchandise to be sold, purchased, and anonymously circulated.Footnote ¹⁸ This social effect of lithography unfolded gradually and became an important precursor to the emergence of bookstores in 20th-century Iran. Locations where inventories of lithographed books were kept and sold became increasingly visible in rapidly growing urban centers like Tehran.Footnote ¹⁹

By the time of the 1906–11 Constitutional Revolution, the contours of Tehran's book market had acquired a discernable form. Bookstalls were clustered together on the northern edge of the bazaar complex in the passageway linking the Masjid-i Jumʿa and the Masjid-i Shah.Footnote ²⁰ This area of the bazaar complex was most commonly referred to as the Bayn al-Haramayn Bazaar, or the Halabisazi Bazaar, after the tinsmiths who were initially established there.Footnote ²¹ Additional booksellers were located in a covered arcade known as the Timcha-yi Hajib al-Dawla, which was located next to the Masjid-i Shah. The arcade took its name from Haj ʿAli Khan Hajib al-Dawla, who sponsored its construction during the reign of Nasir al-Din Shah.Footnote ²² These areas of the bazaar also housed paper, pencil, pen, and ink merchants, calligraphers of ornamental marriage contracts (qabālahā-yi izdivāj), locksmiths, tin and coppersmiths, producers of storage chests, leather artisans, and craftsmen specializing in bookbinding.Footnote ²³ The proximity of the booksellers to the craftsmen, artisans, and sellers of other commodities allowed for the integration of the print economy into the larger economy of the bazaar complex. Booksellers stored and sold their inventories of manuscripts and lithographed books in a “stall” (dukkān) comparable in size to other stalls within the bazaar complex. Consumers used the commercial space of the bookstall to check the availability of books and to negotiate their cost.Footnote ²⁴

The booksellers who pioneered the commercialization of books within the Tehran bazaar had specialized originally in the trade of other commodities, such as sugar and textiles.Footnote ²⁵ Their transition from these commodities to print commodities stemmed from both an intellectual vocation—many of the merchants in the book bazaar were learned figures—and a newfound recognition that the technology of lithography could make the print market more commercially viable.

Among these Qajar-era print entrepreneurs were Haj Mirza Tajir Kashani and his sons Haj Muhammad Husayn Tajir Kitabfurush and Haj Mirza ʿAli Asghar Tajir Kitabfurush. Once merchants in the caravan trade linking their native Kashan to Tehran, the three became printers and booksellers in the commercial economy of Tehran's book bazaar, where they established a book-selling dynasty that would span five generations.Footnote ²⁶ Haj Mirza Kashani's sons became fixtures in the Timcha-yi Hajib al-Dawla during the late Nasir al-Din Shah period, applying their commercial experience as merchants of commodities to the business of print. In the 1920s, they would adopt the family name of Ramazani and establish a number of highly successful print enterprises, including the influential Ibn Sina publisher and bookstore.Footnote ²⁷

Other important late 19th- and early 20th-century figures in the Tehran book bazaar were Haj Shaykh Rizaʾi, Haj Shaykh Muhammad Akhundi, Saʿid Mazlum Shirazi, and members of the Furuhmand, Taraqqi, and Khvansari families.Footnote ²⁸ In the case of the Khvansaris, it was Haj Mirza ʿAli-Akbar Kitabfurush Khvansari who initiated the move from their hometown of Khvansar to Tehran, where he established a successful bookstall that became a multi-generational family enterprise. In the 1920s, the family adopted the name of ʿIlmi and established a publishing house and bookstore of the same name.Footnote ²⁹

The town of Khvansar produced other families of print entrepreneurs as well.Footnote ³⁰ Haj Muhammad Rahim-Khvansari (d. 1926) made the journey to Tehran during the mid-19th century and soon after established a bookstall in Timcha-yi Hajib al-Dawla.Footnote ³¹ Similar to the Ramazani and ʿIlmi families, in the 1920s the heirs of Haj Muhammad Rahim-Khvansari adopted a new family name—Iqbal—and established the eponymous publishing house and book retailer. The Khvansari families’ choice to settle in Tehran rather than another of the period's printing centers, such as Isfahan, Mashhad, Shiraz, or Tabriz, is significant. Whereas Isfahan, for example, was only a day's journey from Khvansar, the more distant Qajar capital city of Tehran had experienced the greater social and economic growth. For this reason, Tehran was the destination of choice for the Khvansari print families and others attracted to the nascent Iranian print industry, and it continued to be so well into the 20th century.Footnote ³²

Among the innovations introduced by these newly arrived print entrepreneurs was the use of lithography to produce books appealing to broader audiences. More commercially conceived than their predecessors, these books included editions of standard religious texts such as the Qurʾan and the Nahj al-Balagha,Footnote ³³ as well as what might be described as illustrated chapbooks, which were used as part of rawza-khvānī and other Shiʿi mourning practices (e.g., Vaʿiz Kashifi's Rawzat al-Shuhadaʾ, Mulla Bamun-ʿAli's Hamla-yi Haydariya, and Muhammad-Baqir Jawhari's Tufan al-Buka).Footnote ³⁴ In terms of popular genres, the print entrepreneurs developed lithographed editions of poetic divans, folktales, jocular literature, romances, and epics such as the Shahnama, the Anvar-i Suhayli, the Rustamnama, the Iskandarnama, Husayn-i Kurd, Chihil Tuti, and Amir Arsalan Rumi. They also produced the popular anecdotes of Mulla Nasr al-Din, ʿUbayd-i Zakani's Mush va Gurba, and many other similar works in multiple lithographed editions.Footnote ³⁵ These books appealed to buyers due to their devotional qualities,Footnote ³⁶ though books were also purchased by individual readers for the purpose of entertainment or by professional storytellers for the purpose of oral recitation.Footnote ³⁷ Given the low level of literacy in Iran, the potential market for these books undoubtedly remained small. Nevertheless, the production of a print inventory with the expectation of sales in the marketplace was part of a larger transformation towards the commercialization of print.

Of equal importance to the evolution of Tehran's print economy was the advent of newspapers.Footnote ³⁸ What lithography had set in motion with respect to textual commodification, the more visible, consumable, and disposable newspapers accelerated. Due to their low cost, frequency, and size—usually consisting of only a few pages of printed text—newspapers had a more significant effect in bringing printed materials into the system of social and economic exchange.Footnote ³⁹ While newspapers and books were distinct types of literary media and demanded different types of reading, the emerging newspaper market and the evolving book market reinforced each other in significant ways: newspapers accelerated the commercialization of print; bookstores became important sites wherein a nascent reading public gained access to newspapers. Although this process began prior to 1906,Footnote ⁴⁰ it accelerated after the signing of the constitution, when controls on newspapers were temporarily lifted. This relaxation of censorship greatly increased the number of newspapers produced and sold in Iran.Footnote ⁴¹

Due in part to state restrictions, the most widely circulating newspapers in Iran prior to 1906 were those published abroad, with Akhtar (Star) of Istanbul, Qanun (Law) of London, Parvarish (Education) of Cairo, and Habl al-Matin (The Firm Cord) of Calcutta among the most noteworthy. Tehran's bookstores were critical to their importation and circulation. The publishers of these newspapers made arrangements—often via international merchant networks—for their distribution through semiofficial representatives (vakīl-i tawzīʿ) within a given Iranian city.Footnote ⁴² Shipments of newspapers, made overtly or covertly via smuggling techniques depending on the threat of censorship,Footnote ⁴³ would then be made to a given vakīl of a newspaper. In a city like Tehran, where commercial networks of merchants and booksellers were well established, it was booksellers who often served as vakīls,Footnote ⁴⁴ though pharmacists and tobacco merchants were also known to do so.Footnote ⁴⁵ In addition to arranging importation of newspapers, vakīls managed subscriptions and provided copies to subscribers (mushtarikīn).Footnote ⁴⁶ They also sold individual issues (tak-furūshī) of newspapers as supply and demand would allow.Footnote ⁴⁷ Many bookstore-owning vakīls not only distributed newspapers but also produced their own. The influential newspaper Akhtar was a product of the Khurshid bookstore in Istanbul, Tarbiyat (Education) was named after a bookstore owned by the newspaper's editor, Muhammad ʿAli Tarbiyat, which had branches in Tabriz and Tehran, and the important Calcutta-based Habl al-Matin was managed and distributed from the bookstore of Jalal al-Din Muʾayyid al-Islam Kashani, who was also its editor and chief writer.Footnote ⁴⁸

In Tehran's constitutional-era print economy, one of the most noteworthy cases of a bookstore-based newspaper was Sharafat (Nobility), which shared its name with Sayyid Husayn Tihrani's bookstore in which it was based. Located adjacent to the Shams al-ʿImara palace on Nasir Khusraw Street,Footnote ⁴⁹ where by 1906 a number of other bookstores had already been established, the Sharafat bookstore was an important vakīl for numerous newspapers.Footnote ⁵⁰ Little is known of its owner Sayyid Husayn, but it is clear that he was both the proprietor of the bookstore and an activist in the cause of the Constitutional Revolution.Footnote ⁵¹

In addition to its political stance, a notable feature of Sharafat was the simplicity of its prose, a characteristic it shared with other newspapers of the time, notably Qanun and Sur-i Israfil (Trumpet Call of Israfil).Footnote ⁵² The use of colloquial language in newspaper prose facilitated a growing congruence between the spoken and written forms of the Persian language—what John Perry has described as Persianate “homoglossia.”Footnote ⁵³ This congruence empowered those with knowledge of only the spoken language to more easily gain access to the written language. When compared with the linguistic and social obstacles posed by the “diglossia”Footnote ⁵⁴ between spoken and written Arabic, or those posed by the great distance between Latin and the vernacular languages of premodern Europe, Persianate homoglossia greatly facilitated the social expansion of Iran's reading public.Footnote ⁵⁵ Similar to Qanun and Sur-i Israfil, Sharafat broke definitively with the conventional style of 19th-century Persian prose; its language was simple, direct, and colloquial, foreshadowing a style that became more commonplace in later 20th-century book prose. In this and other ways, the newspaper economy and the book market reinforced one another socially and culturally. The important effects of transformations in newspaper prose are usually remarked upon in the context of the evolution of Persian literary history.Footnote ⁵⁶ However, their social implications were at least as important, for the new austerity of prose enabled the circulation of newspapers such as Sharafat to popular social classes possessing minimal or no literacy.

The pricing of newspapers also influenced their level of social accessibility. The newspaper print economy had differentiated pricing; Sharafat, for example, was self-consciously affordable, costing a modest sum of one shāhī in Tehran,Footnote ⁵⁷ but with the additional proviso that,

Sayyid Husayn Tihrani went on to write that this policy of gratis circulation was meant to challenge other newspaper publishers, who he hoped would “be ashamed of selling a newspaper for the price of five shāhīs.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Free or near-free circulation of newspapers occurred through other means as well, such as communal reading at social gatherings, religious sites, marketplaces, caravansaries, and coffeehouses.Footnote ⁶⁰ Communal reading also had the advantage of conveying the content of newspapers to those without any literacy.Footnote ⁶¹ In fact, the aural experience of newspapers—like the aural experience of print more generally—remained a common means of encountering text in a culture wherein the line between reading, hearing, and reciting was still undefined.Footnote ⁶²

The proliferation of the new institution of the qirāʾatkhāna, which was increasingly common in other urban centers of the Middle East as well,Footnote ⁶³ also contributed to the expansion of the public's engagement with print.Footnote ⁶⁴Qirāʾatkhānas were privately endowed libraries established with a public mission through the initiative of benefactors, many of whom were merchants and booksellers.Footnote ⁶⁵ These “reading rooms” began to proliferate in Tehran following the easing of press restrictions in 1906, which in turn led to an increase in the number of newspapers published.Footnote ⁶⁶ By the 1920s, qirāʾatkhānas numbered in the dozens, and they were making newspapers freely available.Footnote ⁶⁷ While the growth in the number of qirāʾatkhānas reflects print's increasing penetration of society, the ambiguity concerning their public and private nature reflects a larger ambiguity surrounding institutions involved in the production, sale, and circulation of printed materials at the beginning of the century.Footnote ⁶⁸ Similar to the distinctions between literacy and aurality, the distinctions between bookstores, reading-rooms, and libraries were generally blurred both in terms of how these institutions operated and in terms of their nomenclature. The term kitābkhāna (literally, “house of books”) did not acquire its more standardized meaning of “library” until later in the 20th century, and for much of the century was more commonly used than kitābfurūshī as the term for “bookstore.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Similarly, the term qirāʾatkhāna, referring to a semipublic “reading room,” while in common use in the early 20th century, declined in usage as government-established public libraries, now more commonly referred to as kitābkhānas, came to replace them.Footnote ⁷⁰

All of this suggests that print culture was undergoing rapid change in Iran at the turn of the 20th century. Shifts in how printed materials were produced, distributed, bought, sold, read, and experienced were all measures of a growing public engagement with the world of print. This growing engagement already had important implications for Iranian politics by the time of the Constitutional Revolution, including the political participation of new social classes. As the accessibility of print continued to expand during the first several decades of the 20th century, it produced even larger social and cultural changes with equally decisive implications for Iran's politics.

PRINT COMMERCE AND MASS CULTURE BY MIDCENTURY

The rise of Reza Khan is usually understood as marking the eclipse of the goals established by the constitutionalist movement and initiating a new phase of authoritarian modernization. One important element of this growing authoritarianism was increased control over printed materials. The new Pahlavi state—like other emerging states of the era—saw the broad dissemination of controlled political discourse via the medium of print as one of the tools at its disposal for pursuing modernization and nationalization projects. Therefore, even as censorship grew and political language became increasingly controlled, the public's social and cultural engagement with the world of print continued apace. In fact, the 1920s and 1930s were characterized by a remarkable expansion of Iran's print culture.

This expansion can be quantified by comparing three data sets collected in 1927, 1935, and 1939. The data set from 1927 is from an almanac entitled Gahnama-yi Tihran (Tehran Almanac), which was published by one of the new bookstores of the time, the Kitabkhana-yi Tihran (established on Lalazar Street in 1923 by Husayn Parviz and Hasan Taqizada).Footnote ⁷¹ The almanac describes commercial trends in the city during the mid-1920s and includes data on bookstores.Footnote ⁷² According to its tally, in 1927 a total of forty-nine commercial spaces that could be described as “bookstores” and twenty-three independent printers, most of which still published via the lithograph method, existed in Tehran.Footnote ⁷³ The almanac also provides details on the location of these bookstores and printers within the city, listing twenty-nine in the Tehran bazaar and nineteen along newly built commercial boulevards outside the bazaar catering to new social classes with modern tastes.Footnote ⁷⁴ Of the bazaar bookstores, all were situated within the traditional sites of the Timcha-yi Hajib al-Dawla and the Halabisazi Bazaar; of the new bookstores outside the bazaar, fifteen were on Nasir Khusraw Street, two were on Lalazar Street, and two were near the Maydan-i Sipah and the Maydan-i Baharistan, respectively.Footnote ⁷⁵ The almanac also reveals the names of “book consultants” who operated neither within the bazaar nor within bookstores but rather followed an older tradition of selling books individually to select patrons.Footnote ⁷⁶ Collectively, the 1927 data suggests that modern bookstores were emerging as part of the new urban landscape of the city, but that the older print economy of the bazaar also continued to thrive. The much-noted urban dualism of Tehran during the latter half of the 20th century, according to which a culturally conservative urban underclass was found near the bazaar district while a nascent and socially mobile new middle class was increasingly situated to the north of the city's core, was therefore already discernable in the urban geography of Tehran's print economy as early as the 1920s.Footnote ⁷⁷

The data from 1935 and 1939 reveals an acceleration of this process. This data comes to us from two annual statistical reports (sālnāma va iḥṣāʾīyya) on bookstores, printers, and libraries compiled by the Ministry of Education's Statistical Bureau.Footnote ⁷⁸ The 1935 and 1939 statistics are organized differently: the former distinguishes between “bookstores” and newly established public “libraries,” indicating the year of their establishment; the latter only distinguishes between “bookstores” and “printers,” providing information about the location of each establishment. Nevertheless, comparing these two data sets with that of 1927 allows us to observe broad patterns in the evolution of print commerce during the Reza Shah period. First, the total number of bookstores in Tehran grew significantly, from forty-nine in 1927 to seventy-four in 1935.Footnote ⁷⁹ Second, the geographic distribution of bookstores within the city continued to shift. The 1939 statistics list only ten bookstores in the bazaar, a decline from the twenty-nine locations listed in the 1927 data.Footnote ⁸⁰ By contrast, the number of bookstores outside of the bazaar grew, with thirty-one new bookstores established in the modern commercial zones of the city.Footnote ⁸¹ Sixteen of these bookstores were on Nasir Khusraw Street, while fifteen were located in other modern areas of the city, such as on Lalazar, Firdawsi, Shahabad, Nadiri, and Sipah Streets.Footnote ⁸² This diffusion was partly the result of the booksellers’ attempt to meet a growing demand for books among the city's expanding middle class, since the new bookstores were situated in newly fashionable areas of the city that also saw a growth in cafes, restaurants, cinemas, and hotels.Footnote ⁸³ Yet it was also facilitated by an eminent domain order issued by Tehran's municipal authorities in 1937. The order directed all businesses adjacent to the Shams al-ʿImara Palace, on the west side of Nasir Khusraw Street, to relocate in order to make room for the expansion of the Ministry of Finance.Footnote ⁸⁴

The 1939 data set also reveals another important shift in the print economy: an almost threefold increase in the number of printers from the twenty-three listed in the 1927 data.Footnote ⁸⁵ Neither the 1935 nor the 1939 data indicates which printers were engaged in lithography or typography, but other sources suggest that by the late 1930s commercial presses were increasingly investing in the newer typographic technology.Footnote ⁸⁶ Overall, the data indicates that the number of bookstores, their geographic distribution within the city, as well as the total number of books printed, purchased, and circulated, was growing during the 1920s and 1930s, and that the expansion of this print economy reflected both a growing public engagement with print and an emerging pattern of social division within the city.

This statistical and spatial analysis may, however, obscure an important element of continuity in the world of Tehran's print culture. A closer look at the histories of particular bookstores suggests that among the proprietors of the 1930s were many who had inherited several generations of accumulated experience in Tehran's print economy.Footnote ⁸⁷ One example is Muhammad-ʿAli Taraqqi (1894–1980), the founder of the Kitabkhana-yi Khayyam, which was originally located on Nasir Khusraw Street and became a key institution in Iran's 20th-century print economy.Footnote ⁸⁸ The son of Haj Shaykh Baqir Taraqqi Kitabfurush—himself a pioneering book merchant and lithographer of the Nasir al-Din Shah eraFootnote ⁸⁹—Muhammad-ʿAli Taraqqi decided in 1916 to establish a bookstore on Nasir Khusraw Street that would produce, sell, and trade in emerging forms of print, including literary magazines.Footnote ⁹⁰

The life and work of Muhammad Ramazani (1904–67), founder of the Khavar bookstore on Lalazar Street, follows a similar pattern. Ramazani was one of four sons of Haj Mirza ʿAli-Asghar Tajir Kitabfurush (1871–1937), a successful 19th-century printer and seller of lithographed books in the bazaar economy.Footnote ⁹¹ In 1923 he established his Khavar bookstore, which grew out of this earlier merchant and publishing tradition but also featured significant innovations such as the typographic printing of literary magazines including Sharq (The East) and Afsaneh (Fable).Footnote ⁹² The Khavar bookstore was the first of a number of new publishing and retail firms established by the Ramazani family, the most successful of which was the later Ibn Sina press and bookstore founded by Muhammad Ramazani's brother, Ibrahim Ramazani.Footnote ⁹³

Another key figure whose career marked the transition from the print economy of the bazaar to the world of commercialized typography was Muhammad-ʿAli ʿIlmi (1897–1977), one of five sons born to Haj Muhammad Ismaʿil Khvansari-ʿIlmi (d. 1940).Footnote ⁹⁴ The senior ʿIlmi had descended from a Khvansar bookselling family and eventually became a fixture in the Tehran book bazaar. Similar to the Taraqqis and Ramazanis, the ʿIlmis were originally active in the production and sale of lithographed works. In the 1920s, the eldest of the ʿIlmi brothers, Muhammad-ʿAli, who had assumed the management of the newly established Kitabkhana-yi ʿIlmi on Nasir Khusraw Street, extended the family business to become one of the most successful printers and booksellers of 20th-century Iran.Footnote ⁹⁵ Muhammad-ʿAli ʿIlmi was also instrumental in bringing the publishing, editing, production, and retail aspects of the enterprise under the firm's own management. By establishing their own chāpkhāna (print shop) on a street adjacent to Nasir Khusraw Street in the 1920s, the ʿIlmis dispensed with the practice of outsourcing the production of their books.Footnote ⁹⁶ The ʿIlmi print shop initially continued to produce books via the lithograph technique but by 1939 had become one of the largest commercial publishers to make a complete transition to typography.Footnote ⁹⁷

The Iqbal family followed a similar trajectory. Originally from Khvansar, the family moved to Tehran in the 19th century to participate in the growing print economy of the bazaar.Footnote ⁹⁸ In the Nasir al-Din Shah period, Haj Muhammad Rahim (d. 1926) established a bookstall in the Timcha-yi Hajib al-Dawla; his two sons—Muhammad Husayn and Muhammad Baqir—would build on their father's work by venturing beyond the bazaar to establish a modern printing house and bookstore on Nasir Khusraw Street in the 1920s.Footnote ⁹⁹ The Iqbal bookstore became one of the most successful of its kind in Tehran's rapidly growing print economy, publishing not only books and magazines but also the commercially successful novelty of the wall-hanging calendar.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The Iqbal bookstore's most successful commercial print venture during this early period was, however, its 1936 publication of a Persian-language translation of the Qurʾan in moveable type, which sold one thousand copies in its first week on the market—until then an unprecedented number.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In 1937, Muhammad Husayn Iqbal transferred ownership of the store to his son Javad, who in 1940 relocated the Iqbal bookstore to the even more modern Shahabad Street.Footnote ¹⁰²

The stories of these four families illustrate a new phase in the commercialization of Iran's print culture during the 1920s and 1930s. All four families had their roots in Tehran's 19th-century book bazaar where they participated in the commercialization of print during the transition from the manuscript to the lithograph tradition. Showing the continuity in the history of Tehran's print economy, it was the descendants of these same families who extended the book market beyond the bazaar economy and made the transition to commercialized typography during the 20th century.

Another element of continuity in the history of print was travel in search of inventory, especially as the commercialization of books became more viable.Footnote ¹⁰³ Muhammad-ʿAli Taraqqi, Muhammad Ramazani, Muhammad-ʿAli ʿIlmi, and Muhammad Iqbal all became aware of the new possibilities of commercialized typography during their occasional travels outside of Iran—particularly in centers of book production and trade in India—in search of Persian-language inventory for their Tehran bookstores.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The growing supply of typographic Persian books produced in Lahore, Lucknow, Calcutta, and especially Bombay made a significant impression on Iranian book merchants. The industrialization of print had gained greater pace in India than in Iran during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the growing supply of Persian-language typographic books produced in the subcontinent naturally attracted Tehran's print entrepreneurs. On some occasions, Tehran booksellers traveled to the subcontinent together in what amounted to joint print expeditions. Muhammad-ʿAli Taraqqi and Muhammad Ramazani, for example, made at least two journeys together to Bombay via steamships departing from the ports of Bushehr and Bandar Abbas.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In Bombay, they encountered a substantial expatriate Iranian community that had grown since the mid-19th century.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Some of these Iranians worked as commercial intermediaries in the book trade between Iran and India.

One such figure was Ardishir Khaziʿ (1901–87), an Iranian Zoroastrian poet from Yazd who settled in Bombay in the 1920s and established a bookstore specializing in Persian-language books.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Similarly, Sayyid Muhammad-ʿAli Daʾi al-Islam Larijani (1878–1951) and his son Sayyid Nurrallah Iranparast (1902–92) both spent significant portions of their lives between Bombay and Tehran facilitating the book trade between the two cities.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Sayyid Nurrallah Iranparast became a particularly important bookseller in Tehran, founding the Kitabkhana-yi Danish in 1939. Due to its connection to Bombay, this bookstore was noteworthy for carrying an inventory of typographic Persian-language books printed in India as well as a collection of English-language books in the field of Iranian Studies.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The new books that Taraqqi, Ramazani, ʿIlmi, and Iqbal encountered through these Bombay intermediaries were different in several ways from the inventories found in Tehran's book bazaar. First, the Bombay books had a higher production value due to their typographical print, their industrialized forms of binding, and their inclusion of other elements of modern book production such as tables of contents, indexes, and increasingly by the 1920s and 1930s, photographs. Second, they had a different topical focus, with works sponsored by Bombay's Parsi community covering previously obscure subjects such as Zoroastrianism.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Third, they included typeset editions of classical Persian poetry and works by Persian writers only in circulation in South Asia at that time.Footnote ¹¹¹ The increasing orientation of the book trade towards India thus opened up new possibilities in terms of not only production techniques, but also inventory and subject matter. As ʿAbd al-Rahim Jaʿfari (1919–), the founder of Tehran's Amir Kabir publisher and bookstore, recalled in his memoir of the Tehran book market of his youth, “in those days the Persian books printed in Bombay were famous, and in Tehran there was a good market for them.”Footnote ¹¹²

The growing presence of imported typographic books paralleled a number of other changes in Iran's print economy during the 1920s and 1930s. On aesthetic grounds, typography became increasingly normalized during this period, first through the growing medium of newsprint and imported books, and later through the increasing utilization of government-issued documents. Part of the process of state building during the late Qajar and early Pahlavi periods was investment in government-operated printing houses for the purpose of issuing official records via the new typeset technology.Footnote ¹¹³ The normalization of typography also grew out of the debates surrounding language reform. While radical calls for linguistic change involving, for example, the replacement of Arabic script with Latin were controversial and faced numerous obstacles, the growing ubiquity of a new Persian typescript derived from the naskh script can be seen as one of the language reform movement's modest achievements. The naskh script had traditionally been used for Qurʾan manuscript production, but its novel adoption in newsprint, legal documents, bureaucratic records, and other nonparochial contexts reinforced a more general process of cultural secularization. The new typescript also gave the Persian language an increased readability and mechanized standardization when compared to the nastaʿlīq script that had long dominated both the manuscript and lithograph traditions of book production in the Persianate world. Therefore, for these aesthetic, practical, technological, and cultural reasons, the mechanization of the Persian language conformed to the goals of those advocating linguistic modernization.Footnote ¹¹⁴

The ascendency of type was also attributable to social and economic factors. Although by the 1920s government printing houses had already made investments in the new technology, commercial publishers hesitated to do so largely because the necessary capital investments for the transition were prohibitive. Publishers would need to cover the cost of importing large, expensive, and technically complex printing presses and specially customized Persian typesets, as well as of training craftsmen long accustomed to the lithograph technique to master the new and tedious method of typesetting. For commercial presses, these investments were difficult to justify.Footnote ¹¹⁵ By the 1930s, however, the growth of a rapidly expanding reading public made typography commercially viable for Tehran's print entrepreneurs.

The variable that most facilitated the sudden viability of typography in the 1930s was the expansion of state-sponsored public education in the 1920s. The growth of the public school system affected the culture and commerce of print in a number of ways. First, it produced a significant rise in literacy rates. Although the latter are difficult to measure for this period, we can estimate that they increased markedly from the single-digit figure at the beginning of the century.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Tehran more than doubled its population from 200,000 to 500,000 residents between 1920 and 1940 while also improving its literacy rate. Literate people were attracted to the capital city to staff the expanding bureaucracy. Tehran's larger share of state investment in public education compared to other cities also worked to increase the number of literate residents in the city.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Although mass literacy was not achieved in the capital until the second half of the 20th century, estimates that 30 to 40 percent of the city's rapidly growing population had some degree of literacy by the 1940s seem reasonable.Footnote ¹¹⁸ For publishers, meeting the print and commercial demands of this growing population of reader-consumers meant having to invest in the newer typographic presses.

The expansion of modern schooling had other effects as well. Schools became important sites where modern habits of reading were acquired. As mentioned above, the growth of typography was driven in part by the increase in now standardized government-produced legal documents such as birth certificates, passports, marriage licenses, and identity papers. Part of this avalanche of print was the growth of school textbooks through which Iranian students acquired not only literacy and official state-administered narratives of national history, but also an important visual introduction to the Persian language in typeset form. A generation of schoolchildren who passed through the public school system during the 1920s and 1930s thereby came to associate the visual experience of typography with the experience of book reading. These reading habits shaped their expectations as they grew to become reader-consumers in the Tehran print economy of the 1940s and beyond.

Textbooks also had economic effects on Tehran's evolving print market. It was the city's privately owned bookstores that produced and sold textbooks directly to students and their families from 1927 onwards.Footnote ¹¹⁹ While government-operated printing houses were capable of publishing textbooks, the Ministry of Education was unable to meet the demand of Iran's growing public school system.Footnote ¹²⁰ Nationwide enrollment figures reflect impressive, yet challenging, growth levels during this period. Coeducational primary and secondary enrollment rose from 44,819 students in 1922 to 183,204 in 1935 to 834,434 by 1951.Footnote ¹²¹ To provide school materials to all these students, the Ministry of Education formed an agreement with Tehran's private publishers whereby they would produce and sell textbooks directly to the public but the content of those textbooks would be subject to government regulation.Footnote ¹²² Because guidelines for textbooks were now standardized, and because the Tehran print industry was considerably more developed than that of other Iranian urban centers, the Tehran publishers became the de facto textbook publishers for schools throughout Iran.

The requirement to purchase textbooks guaranteed a customer base for the publishers and booksellers on Nasir Khusraw Street, providing them a significant degree of financial security. Indeed, on account of this customer base the number of Tehran printers increased threefold between 1927 and 1939. In terms of the evolution of the print economy, this public–private partnership also provided the necessary incentive for publishers to make the capital investments required for the transition to new typographic printing presses, which were now required by the Ministry of Education for the production of the new textbooks. As ʿAbd al-Rahim Jaʿfari recalled, by the 1940s the ʿIlmi bookstore had set aside half of its shelf-space for the sale of schoolbooks.Footnote ¹²³ Jaʿfari—who began his career as an apprentice to the lithographers in the ʿIlmi print shop and by the late 1930s was promoted to bookkeeper at the retail location—recalled using an abacus to count the sale of textbooks at the beginning of each school year; as he writes, the line of customers waiting to purchase textbooks at the ʿIlmi bookstore on Nasir Khusraw Street stretched “out the door and down the street.”Footnote ¹²⁴

The growing commercial viability of the book market encouraged publishers to take risks in the types of books they published. One initiative was the publication of new standard editions of Persian literary classics, such as the Shahnama, the Gulistan, the Rubaʿiyat, and the Masnavi, as well as the divans of classical poets, which had long been exclusively produced either in manuscript form or via lithography. For example, Bizhan Taraqqi recalls that his father, Muhammad-ʿAli Taraqqi, the founder of the Khayyam bookstore on Nasir Khusraw Street, took a special interest in producing modern print editions of classic Persian works, including poetry, historical works, and reference books.Footnote ¹²⁵ During the early years of the Khayyam bookstore, Taraqqi had imported printed editions of Persian literary classics from India, but the Khayyam bookstore now began to publish typeset Tehran editions of these works. Multivolume works such as Rawzat al-Safa, the Habib al-Siyar, the Tarikh-i Balʿami, and the Farhang-i Anandraj were all published by the Khayyam press in modern editions from the late 1930s onward.Footnote ¹²⁶ The cost of publishing such multivolume works with limited and specialized audiences was difficult to justify. However, having achieved a degree of financial stability, Taraqqi, like others engaged in the growing print economy, felt compelled to publish them out of an intellectual commitment to transfer these classical works into the modern medium of print.

The growth of the print economy enabled other innovations as well, such as the publication of modern dictionaries and reference works, literature in translation, and original Persian-language fiction. The appearance of these new genres reflected a growing public engagement with the world of print and an attempt by Tehran's publishers to meet the demand posed by new social classes entering the print economy. Dictionaries and other reference works, for example, served the educational needs of emerging social classes passing through the expanding school system—both at the primary and secondary levels—as well as the newly established University of Tehran. As economic, scientific, and professional advancement increasingly required the acquisition of foreign languages, Tehran's bookstores and publishers began producing low-priced, mass-produced, and student-oriented bilingual dictionaries.Footnote ¹²⁷ The years 1928 to 1930 witnessed the publication of three bilingual English–Persian dictionaries, the most famous of which was Sulayman Hayyim's two-volume work published originally in 1930 by the Iranian Jewish-owned Barukhim publisher and bookstore in Tehran.Footnote ¹²⁸ The other two were Husayn Zahidi Shalfurush's English–Persian dictionary published by the Khayyam bookstore in 1928 and ʿAli-Asghar Kavusi Burumand's English-language learning materials, also published by Khayyam. Inexpensive and mass-produced French–Persian, German–Persian, and Russian–Persian dictionaries also became increasingly available in the Tehran print market beginning in the late 1920s, as did self-study instructional materials (khudāmūzi) for learning these and other languages.Footnote ¹²⁹ Publishers experimented with multiple formats, producing not only large multivolume dictionaries but also new pocket-sized (jībī) editions. The multiple editions of the successful Farhang-i Khayyam (Khayyam Dictionary), for example, a pocket-sized version of Husayn Zahidi Shalfurush's 1928 English–Persian dictionary, consisted of what its editor described as the ten thousand essential words and idioms necessary for learning “the standard language of commerce.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Dictionaries of idiomatic phrases in English and other European languages, as well as specialized dictionaries of technical phrases in fields such as education, sociology, geography, psychology, accounting, law, and engineering, also became increasingly common among a growing segment of modern-educated urban professionals.Footnote ¹³¹

A similar pattern existed in the genres of Persian literature and literature translated into Persian. By midcentury publishers were increasingly eager to publish both pulp fiction, which catered to a growing reading public seeking new forms of entertainment, as well as avant-garde literature, which likewise appealed to new classes of urban readers. One of the social effects of this proliferation of genres was that by the 1950s emerging writers were no longer limited to audiences of readers inhabiting the traditional literary salons of Tehran; their publishers and booksellers were now increasingly able to market books directly to a mass reading public. This change in the nature of authorship and readership enabled certain writers to achieve new types of literary celebrity.Footnote ¹³²