Vol. 79/No. 23      June 22, 2015

Hundreds of thousands of people visit the fair, which is free of charge, in order to browse books from hundreds of publishers, enjoy good discounts and look for special titles for their studies.

Three pavilions are set aside for international publishers. Pathfinder Press books have been sold at the fair since 1992. A May 14 dispatch by the semiofficial Mehr News Agency reported that the Pathfinder stand this year displayed “documentary works on the Communist International, Fourth International and Socialist Workers Party, writings of Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X and other American and international leftist leaders, as well as historical and analytical works on a variety of national and international political issues.”

Visitors come to the Tehran book fair from all over Iran. A man from Kurdistan said he had come this year hoping to find more international publishers “because of the negotiations and the prospects of easing the sanctions,” referring to talks between the Iranian and U.S. and European governments. He got an issue of the Marxist magazine New International featuring “Our Politics Start with the World” by Jack Barnes, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States.

A Farsi translation of this work was released at this year’s fair by the Iranian publisher Talaye Porsoo, which translates and sells many Pathfinder titles. Reviewing the book May 17, a writer for the Iran Book News Agency said that Two Worlds at Night: The Legacy of Imperialism and the Road to Social and Cultural Advance — the book’s title in Farsi — gives evidence that poverty and underdevelopment in Africa, the Middle East and much of Asia and the Americas “are a consequence of the workings of capitalism on a world scale.”

The reviewer notes Barnes’ explanation that more than a third of the world’s population has no access to modern energy, and says the SWP leader emphasizes the political fight to enable working people worldwide to use resources and technology to close the gap between the industrially advanced and semicolonial countries.

A young worker from Afghanistan was one of many people who bought collections of speeches by Malcolm X, a revolutionary leader of Blacks and other working people in the U.S. in the 1960s. A number of people who came by Pathfinder’s booth also picked up Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by Barnes. One was especially interested after reading Malcolm’s explanation in that book of why he stopped describing his political course as Black nationalism after meeting “true revolutionaries” in Africa and elsewhere who were white.

Pathfinder’s titles on the fight for women’s emancipation were popular, as well as books by Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and other leaders of the socialist revolution in Cuba. The Pathfinder booth featured Voices From Prison, I Will Die the Way I’ve Lived and Absolved by Solidarity — three recent books about five Cuban revolutionaries who spent years in Washington’s prisons for their actions in defense of the Cuban Revolution. Last December the final three of them returned to a hero’s welcome in Cuba.

In addition to Two Worlds at Night, Talaye Porsoo presented three new translations of Pathfinder books at the fair, including Pages from History: Women and Revolution by Mary-Alice Waters and Evelyn Reed and volume 3 of the Farsi edition of Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power. Its best sellers included The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and Socialism and Man in Cuba by Guevara.

A bookstore in Kurdistan bought 225 Talaye Porsoo books during the event. And a bookseller from Afghanistan told the booth’s staff he had recently bought through a commercial distributor 100 copies each of Socialism and Man in Cuba and Barnes’ The Changing Face of U.S. Politics.

Golâzin, another Iranian publisher that translates and sells Pathfinder titles in Farsi, displayed those books again this year, including Cosmetics, Fashions, and the Exploitation of Women; Che Guevara Speaks; and Problems of Women’s Liberation.
 
 
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