Vol. desk · Tbilisi · 2026

Charts drawn from the figures you already keep

A turning point is easier to argue when it sits on a sheet of paper, annotated, dated, and large enough to hang in a corridor.

On Chavchavadze Avenue we keep a small drawing office. Clients bring a question — whether a harvest is bending, whether passenger counts at the airport are repeating last year’s shape, whether a price series has broken its usual winter dip — and we answer with charts, not with a speech.

The work is slow on purpose. A researcher lists the sources. A chartist draws the series at a grain you can read from a chair. A sitting walks the annotations: the month that broke the pattern, the year that must not be compared, the range we are willing to write down as a forecast.

If you already keep ledgers, customs files, or Geostat extracts, bring them. If you do not, we will say which published returns can carry the question and which cannot. We do not invent a series to make a picture look complete.

Request a briefing

The work

Briefings the desk will take

Hands writing longhand notes beside stacked manuscript pages

Commissioned trend briefing

One named question, a source list, six to twelve charts, and a sitting to read the turning points aloud.

Fountain pen resting on cream writing paper

Seasonal outlook sheets

A short set of wall charts that show the usual seasonal shape of one series, and where this year sits against it.

Stacks of worn bound books in warm library light

Archive reconstruction

Scattered ledgers and yearbooks drawn into a single readable series, with every join and missing year marked on the sheet.

People seated at a long table with papers during a working discussion

Board reading

A ninety-minute sitting in which the sheets are walked in hanging order and the forecast range is spoken, not slid past.

A letter on file

After the wine-export sheets went up

We had the monthly export kilos in a notebook. What we did not have was a drawing that showed the autumn stall against the three years before it. The desk sent six sheets and a sitting. The corridor chart is the one the cellar master still points at when the board asks whether to hold the bottling.
Ketevan L., Kakheti bottling house

Notes from the drawing board

Rows of crops in a field, a reminder that seasons refuse a single number

A forecast sentence is not a drawn range

We will write a range the figures will bear. We will not write a single number to make a board motion easier.

A quiet office desk with papers, the sort of room where a wall chart is hung

Why wall charts still hang in Tbilisi trade offices

A corridor chart is a shared object. People can point at a month. They cannot point at a sentence someone said last Tuesday.

Hands holding a written letter above a wooden table

What to bring to the first sitting

You do not need a polished dossier. You need the papers you actually trust and the decision the charts must survive.