Mgvimeli, Shio. Boy, Don't Catch the Butterfly (Bicho, nu icher pepelas) Illustrated by Z. Medzmariashvili. Tbilisi, 1967. In Georgian.

მღვიმელი, შიო.
ბიჭო, ნუ იჭერ პეპელას : ლექსები უმცროსი სასკოლო ასაკის ბავშვთათვის / ილუსტრაციები ზ. მეძმარიაშვილისა.
თბილისი : ნაკადული, 1967. 22 გვერდი, ილუსტრირებული.
ნაბეჭდი გარეკანი. ტირაჟი 50 000 ც.
***
Mgvimeli, Shio. Boy, Don't Catch the Butterfly : poems for children of younger school age / illustrated by Z. Medzmariashvili.
Tbilisi : Nakaduli, 1967. 22 pp., illustrated throughout.
Paper wrappers. Print run of 50,000 copies.
Wrappers good: edge and corner rubbing, small chip at spine head, faint staining to upper left corner of rear wrapper. Text block very good: clean and firm, illustrations bright throughout.

A charming example of Soviet Georgian children's book publishing from the Thaw-into-Brezhnev era, issued by Nakaduli, Tbilisi's principal Georgian-language children's press, whose name itself descends from one of the earliest Georgian children's periodicals (1904-1927), a magazine that had counted Akaki Tsereteli, Vazha-Pshavela, and Mgvimeli himself among its contributors. Shio Mgvimeli, pen name of Shio Ilarionovich Kuchukishvili, was one of the twentieth century's most beloved Georgian children's poets; a national literary prize for children's writing bears his name today. This small collection gathers eighteen short lyric poems (pp. 5-21), pastoral and domestic in subject: butterflies, swallows, seasons, flowers, and childhood mischief, written in the direct, sing-song register characteristic of Georgian primary-school verse. The book is illustrated throughout by Z. Medzmariashvili in a lively, loosely brushed style typical of Georgian children's book graphics of the period, with a decorative frontispiece pairing a folk-textile motif with a large stylized moth or butterfly opposite the title. Issued in a print run of 50,000 copies for the Georgian SSR school and library market, such illustrated verse booklets were produced in enormous numbers but are seldom preserved intact outside Georgia; surviving copies are of interest to collectors of Georgian-language ephemera, Soviet children's book illustration, and the broader corpus of Caucasian minority-language print culture.