Vol. 75/No. 23      June 13, 2011

Twenty copies of Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible? by Mary-Alice Waters were sold at the May 4-14 book fair. Twelve visitors to the stand also picked up Soldier of the Cuban Revolution: From the Cane Fields of Oriente to General of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, by Cuban revolutionary leader Luis Alfonso Zayas.

The Tehran fair is one of the largest cultural events in the Middle East. Large numbers of people came from all parts of Iran, often travelling many hours on buses. Pathfinder Books from London has brought its books here for close to two decades.

Two young men from the city of Shiraz came looking for the Pathfinder stand. A friend back home had sent them text messages with Pathfinder titles he wanted: The Long View of History by George Novack, The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning by Jack Barnes, and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Frederick Engels.

A young woman studying civil engineering picked up The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Engels and Lenin’s Final Fight. “I don’t need these books for my studies, but I need these books,” she said.

A man from Tabriz bought The Case of Leon Trotsky. “All we know about is Lenin and Stalin; I want to know what Leon Trotsky was about,” he said.

Top seller at the stand was Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by Jack Barnes, with 24 copies sold. An Arab woman from Khuzestan Province, bordering Iraq in the south, was attracted to the book’s description of the stance of the Russian Bolsheviks on the national question under V.I. Lenin’s leadership.

One young man who had bought the Workers Power book in 2010 came to ask, “What’s next?” He decided to get The Changing Face of U.S. Politics, also by Barnes. Two young men who had read Farsi translations of Pathfinder titles on women’s emancipation decided to buy the English edition of Woman’s Evolution by Evelyn Reed. Two volumes of a three-volume Farsi translation of this title were on sale at the fair at the stand of its publisher, Nashre Gôlazin.

An Afghan youth, 18, came by with his father and younger brother. He wanted books to help him find out about the world outside of Iran and Afghanistan. He said he had little money but bought the pamphlet version of Malcolm X Talks to Young People.

Talaye Porsoo, which has published a number of translations of Pathfinder titles, reported selling more than 700 books, almost twice that of last year. Their top seller was The Communist Manifesto. They also reported good sales of new titles, such as Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible?, Their Transformation and Ours, The Stewardship of Nature, and the first volume of Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power.  
 
 
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