Book Production within Iran: A Look at the Numbers

Abstract

In this chapter, I use the data of the Iran Book House to analyse the productionof books within Iran after the 1979 revolution and its ties to politics. This is an example of how the methods of digital humanities and book history can be used to help us to understand a literature that has not often been its object of study. The study juxtaposes this data to the discourse of literary practitioners I have been exposed to when doing fieldwork in the literary field in Iran between 2006 and 2017. As such, it confirms some ideas, for example the ebb and flow of publications according to politics, and contradicts others, such as that governmental publishers publish higher quantities of texts than independent ones. The chapter analyses data on the link between books’ production and who is in government; the decline of the number of copies published over the years since 1979; the decreasing amount of translations versus original texts; the increased centralisation of book production in Tehran; and the relative minority of governmental publishers compared to independent publishers.