Lolashvili, I. At the Origins of Georgian Book and Writing (Kartuli ts'ignisa da mts'erlobis sats'q'isebtan). 1st edition, 1978. In Georgian

ლოლაშვილი, ივანე.
ქართული წიგნისა და მწერლობის საწყისებთან / ივანე ლოლაშვილი ; საქართველოს სსრ წიგნის მოყვარულთა საზოგადოება.
თბილისი : გამომცემლობა "საბჭოთა საქართველო", 1978. 112 გვერდი, 8 ფურცელი ილუსტრაცია ; 20 სმ. ტირაჟი 20000 ც. 
***
Lolashvili, Ivane. At the Origins of Georgian Book and Writing / published for the Georgian SSR Society of Book Lovers.
Tbilisi: "Sabchota Sakartvelo" Publishing House, 1978. 112 pp., 8 leaves of illustrations ; 20 cm. First edition.
Print run of 20,000 copies. Original illustrated paper wrappers. 
Condition good: wear and cracking at the spine and corners; a few light surface scuffs to the front wrapper. Text block good: clean and complete throughout.

Ivane Lolashvili, a leading Georgian philologist and long-time head of the Old Georgian Literature department at the Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian Literature, wrote this popular-science volume for the Georgian Society of Book Lovers to introduce a general readership to the earliest chapters of Georgian written culture. The book traces the historical and bibliographic evidence for pre-Christian Georgian book culture, surveys centers of learning and literacy in antique Georgia, and examines Georgia's cultural contacts with Byzantium in the fourth century. Its central chapters address the proclamation of Christianity as the state religion and the struggle for the new faith's dominance in fourth-to-fifth-century Kartli, followed by a study of anti-Mazdean (anti-Zoroastrian) Georgian hagiographic narratives composed in the fifth and sixth centuries as literary weapons in that religious contest. Issued in a large run of 20,000 copies as part of a popular series aimed at cultivating public interest in Georgia's literary heritage, the volume nonetheless draws on Lolashvili's specialist research into the earliest Georgian manuscript tradition, making it useful both to general readers and to students of early Christian Caucasian literature.