The majority of wordless picturebooks produced in Europe are produced in Northern and Western European countries. However, the oldest example of the form used in this corpus is a Lithuanian wordless picturebook originally published in 1961. It has been republished in a special edition in 2018. Lithuania, like Europe as a whole, has undergone significant levels of change between these two dates, and a contemporary reading of the picturebook enables an exploration of the role of the past in shaping the present. This work, inspired by early Italian picturebooks such as those by Bruno Munari, is at times a surreal look at different professions and types of leisure: beekeepers, chef, sailors, chimney sweep. It is a light-hearted picturebook of cultural value as an early example of wordless picturebooks produced in what is now the Eastern side of the European Union.
