About Us

Since 1979 Ibex has been committed to publishing works which introduce the best of the Persian language, literature, culture and history to the world.

We are an independent press located in the Washington DC area. Our titles vary from those mainly of interest to the scholar to those friendly to the general layman.

We publish in both English and Persian. Mainly because of the assimilation of the Iranian population outside of Iran, we are publishing more English titles in recent years. Along the years we have published reference books, textbooks for the study of Persian and other Middle-Eastern languages, autobiographies of notable Iranians and many books in Persian which could not be published in Iran. We have brought back to life E.G. Browne’s eternal Literary History of Persian, the first (and many say best) comprehensive Persian cookbook and Wilberforce-Clarke’s detailed and complete translation of Hafez. We also distribute the books of the historically important Harvard University Iranian Oral History Project and Farhang Moaser. Volume six of the revealing diaries of Alam, “the Shah’s best friend,” should be out later this year. We also have a soft spot for Hafez , the most beloved poet of the land of poets. We have, so far, published four diverse translations of his poetry. We have also published a few titles that had literary merit outside of the main scope of our mission including a translation of a prize winning novel from Haiti.

We have a store, Iranbooks. If you are in the Washington DC area, please visit the store. Iranbooks also sell books from other publishers about Iran. You may visit their web site: iranbooks.com

The Ibex is a mountain goat found in Iran. It resembles the animal in the logo we used before we chose the name Ibex for our company. Ibex is also a phonetic play on the name Iranbooks.

The Ibex is even found in the United States. There are several hundred on the loose in Arizona. Apparently two were given as a gift during Shah's time, somehow got into the wild, and multiplied. The Persian for an ibex is pâzan or pâzhan. We have used “Châp-e Pâzhan,” because it is short, sounds okay, and contains three of the non-Arabic Persian letters cheh, peh and zheh.

Pre-historic animated ibexThe oldest example of animation is apparently that of an ibex. A 5,200-year-old bowl found in Iran’s Burnt City in the 1970s features a series of five images that researchers have only recently identified as being sequential, much like those in a zoetrope. Giving the bowl a spin, one would see a goat leaping to snatch leaves from a tree, as seen in this image.

The remarkable piece of pottery was unearthed from a burial site by Italian archaeologists, who hadn’t noticed the special relationship between the images that adorned the circumference. That discovery was made years later by Iranian archaeologist Dr. Mansur Sadjadi, who was later hired to direct the excavation of The Burnt City, located 57 kilometers from the city of Zabol in the southeastern Iranian province of Sistan-Baluchestan.

Mr. Mohammad Nasserifard has collected photographs and information on Iranian petroglyphs, some over 40,000 years old. In ninety percent of them, the subjects are ibex.