There are many words in Persian for the act of seeing literally or metaphorically, some with Persian and some with Arabic origins, such as looking, seeing, observing, noticing, watching, discerning, perceiving, and beholding. This indicates the importance of looking in the eyes of Iranians in the present and past. In the past daily life and pre-modern education, in which learning mainly was achieved through observation, the practice of observing was an important step in learning. You might attend school in order to be taught and study or you might not attend school and learn on your own by observing without any teacher to teach and you could teach yourself and be self-taught. In modern and post-modern times, observing still is required in learning for those who truly seek to learn and are not content with what their teacher teaches.
The practice of beholding and learning through observing is more enjoyable without any good-humored or ill-humored teacher around. The exploratory joy of learning in such a way that you stand and watch wherever and how much you desire and explore as much as your capacity allows. This is the joy of observing and the pleasure of beholding! The covers you will see the following pages will bring you this kind of joy and pleasure. The joy which derives its value from observing, looking around, and watching.
In visual arts and fields, the act of watching and observing is a key step in learning and entering this new world. In such a manner that looking at the work of art enables us to discover its nature. Observing is learning.
Book cover designs change because of the book designers’ talents and abilities or cultural capacities or tastes of the time. Looking at the covers in the following pages, apart from watching something beautiful, is a practice to behold, learn, enjoy and discover the technical and art capacity of a not-much-far-distant past and they are also a document of our printed visual arts of the past to be shown to near and distant acquaintances “so they would not say we were not in possession of such knowledge”.1
* The covers for this note were given to Neshan by our dear friend, Amir Keykhosro Kiani collected from his personal library. We are enormously grateful to him.
1. Last words in Bondar Bidakhsh: In the Testament of Bondar Bidakhsh, in Trilateral Readings by Bahram Beyzai, Roshangaran Women’s Studies Publishing, Tehran, 1997.p.99