In September 1900 a book on an unusual and rather esoteric foreign topic, by a perhaps slightly eccentric gentleman scholar of Glaswegian origin, was published in London. By 1909 five further volumes on the same topic had appeared, and the resulting sixvolume History of Ottoman Poetry had – posthumously – established its author, E. J. W. Gibb, as the foremost authority on the literary culture of the Ottoman Empire in the English-speaking world. He was, in fact, virtually the only such authority, as this field of study was practically non-existent in English until he created it. Gibb's History of Ottoman Poetry – HOP to its users – dominated the subject for decades and, at the present time, over a century after its first publication, is still regularly referred to; in 1999 it was translated into Turkish. HOP remains by far the most significant contribution by a British scholar to the study of Ottoman literature.

Elias John Wilkinson Gibb (known to his family as John) was born in 1857 to Elias J. Gibb, a Glasgow wine merchant, and his wife Jane Gilmour. Apart from a rather tenuous connection through a cousin of his grandfather, a Church of Scotland minister named Gavin Gibb who was Professor of Oriental languages at the University of Glasgow in the 1820s, Gibb the Ottomanist appears to have had no immediate personal or family association with the Muslim world to inspire him in his choice of study. Described in the 1881 Glasgow population census as a wine merchant's clerk, he could have had easy access to a successful and lucrative future in his father's business. However, by that date his first publications had already appeared: a translation into English of the account by a major sixteenth-century Ottoman historian of the capture of Constantinople in 1453, and a first translation of an Ottoman poem. His course was set.

Gibb's fascination with Ottoman culture seems to have begun at an early age, perhaps serendipitously. A gifted linguist in European languages at school, he learned a few Turkish words from a schoolfriend whose father had lived in the Ottoman Empire, had himself photographed wearing a fez and a Turkish uniform, and apparently earned the nickname Mahomet. At the University of Glasgow (1873–75) he studied mathematics, logic and Arabic, to which he privately added Persian and Turkish.