In 1981, Iradj Bagherzade, who has died aged 80, established the publishing firm of IB Tauris (IBT), “a university press without a university”. Its name was composed of his initials and the old name for his ancestral home city of Tabriz in northwestern Iran, near its borders with Turkey, Azerbaijan and Armenia.
Established with money from his family and private individuals, it quickly became a leader in Middle Eastern studies (around a third of its output), as well as the arts and culture. Bagherzade was always seeking to redress the balance of a worldview that he felt was too centred on the Greek and Roman tradition, with insufficient regard given to contributions made by the mighty Persian empire.
Two decades later, IBT’s book Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia (2000) by the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid came into its own after the 9/11 attacks of the following year. It quickly became essential reading for western leaders, including the then prime minister Tony Blair, and the unlikeliest of bestsellers, with sales of 500,000 copies in English and licences granted for 27 international editions. Payments were sometimes problematic: a bank transfer from Sweden marked “For the Taliban” was frozen and took months to release.
With IBT’s staff of 30 under the steady hand of managing director Jonathan McDonnell, Bagherzade could have relaxed into an executive role, but what he enjoyed – and was supremely good at – was putting people and ideas together. The BBC journalist Laura Trevelyan met him at No 10 Downing Street as Blair was attempting to build support for the impending Iraq war. She recalled: “I never did discover Iradj’s view on the war, but he was very droll, very funny. A year or so later I did a radio documentary about my family and how I kept bumping into them in the course of my work. Iradj called to say he’d heard it while ‘taking a bath’ and it would make a great book – it would be ‘cinematic’, a favourite word.”
A Very British Family: The Trevelyans and Their World (2006) told the story of their slave-owning past. “It was an obvious thing to do but the idea had never occurred to me,” said Trevelyan, whom Bagherzade then encouraged to explore another set of ancestors, inventors of the Winchester, renowned rifle of the American frontier, in Winchester: Legend of the West (2016). “He was a fantastic editor. His notes were very good, and he understood the great historical sweep.”
Sir John Tusa found him “very curious, interested, and interesting, and always tickled by an idea that was slightly different and original. He never went down conventional lines.” The resulting books were Tusa’s Engaged with the Arts (2007) and Pain in the Arts (2014), to be followed by Arts and Minds.
In 2018 Bagherzade sold the firm to Bloomsbury for £5.8m. By then the backlist was in excess of 4,000, with about 250 new titles published annually – peer-reviewed monographs and major works of reference alongside academic and general titles.
Born in Vienna during the second world war, Iradj was the son of Mahrokh Elhami and Abdolmohammad Bagherzade. From their base in north-western Iran, the family had sold agricultural products into Russia and Central Asia for generations. When the Russian revolution of 1917 closed that market, Iradj’s grandfather set his sights on the commercial centres of Europe, sending his sons to live in “affluent ex-pat bubbles”.
When life in Vienna became difficult, the family moved to Marienbad, a spa town in what was then Czechoslovakia, and, after the war, to Paris and eventually Iran. Iradj was sent to Bedford school, from where he went to study law at Wadham College, Oxford, graduating in 1965.
At the end of their first year, he and fellow student Michael Palin went to Germany to sell encyclopaedias to US soldiers based there. They failed at that, at selling Bibles, and when they were assigned jobs as waiters, Bagherzade dropped a trayful of drinks, so bringing about a further demotion – to latrine duty.
After Oxford, Bagherzade went to the US intending to study for a master’s at Yale. Instead, he joined the book publisher Time-Life, working first in Manhattan before postings to Amsterdam, London and in the mid-70s Tehran.
Fluent in several languages as well as Farsi, Bagherzade was well-suited to developing the Middle Eastern ambitions of what was then an American powerhouse. But with the Shah deposed in 1979 and his successor, the country’s first president, Abolhassan Banisadr, impeached by Ayatollah Khomeini, western-educated intellectuals such as Bagherzade were neither welcome nor safe.
Bagherzade was briefly detained and interrogated before leaving for Switzerland to be reunited with Shahnaz Hakimzadeh, whom he had met in Tehran. They married in London in 1981, and the new publishing house found a home in Covent Garden where projects could be discussed at length.
Alex Wright, who served as an executive editor at the firm, remembered Bagherzade’s “gifted knack of attracting not just great writers but also talented and highly individualistic colleagues – he was polymathic in his interests and knowledge, subtle and astute in his thinking and full of small kindnesses and generosities”.
He is survived by Shahnaz, their daughter, Tara, and son, Nezam, and three grandchildren.
• Iradj Bagherzade, publisher, born 27 December 1942; died 9 January 2023
