Book Workshop
A book workshop for children aged 7 to 11 at the Vake branch of the Tbilisi Mediatheka, the city’s union of multifunctional libraries, led by Sandro as a children’s writer and illustrator, together with Nini Tevdorashvili. It opened on 25 November 2018, with an open day for parents the day before.
Children dream, imagine and invent all kinds of things; then they grow up and much of it is lost, although that is when the seed appears that later lets some people change the world. The workshop gave children a way to express themselves: to share their thoughts, dreams and views of the world in short texts and drawings, and to see them published as books.
The children met every Sunday for two hours. Sandro read them his own children’s books and books by other authors, and they talked about the questions the books raised. They asked what a book is, who makes it and what it is for, followed the history of the book from cave drawings, Sumerian clay tablets and Egyptian books to manuscripts, Gutenberg’s press, today’s book and the book of the future, and compared printed and electronic books. Then each child told their own stories in drawings and short texts.
Sandro designed, laid out and made up the books from the children’s work: twelve books, one for each young author, from twelve to twenty-four pages, printed under the Sandro’s Books label. Participation was free; the places went to the first children to register.
