Books on Display: Improving Your Home’s Interior Design with Books

We’re told not to judge a book by its cover. Look inside and just appreciate the story or knowledge that lies within. This is, after all, where the value of books are really stored.

But if you love books for all they have inside of them, you know that they belong in the home. They deserve to be shown off to everyone that visits.

By displaying your books proudly within your home, you allow them to be conversation starters, let them take the focus of a room, and even improve the interior design of the entire place.

Book displays have been a staple of the interior design of homes since the 1930’s, and their appeal isn’t going away anytime soon.

Even if you don’t have enough to fill a whole home library, just about everyone owns some books. And if you own books, you need to figure out a way to display them, whether in their own elaborate space or simply as a backdrop to your home office.

How the Display of Books Matters

There are many reasons to prioritize displaying your books instead of letting them just hide away in a corner.

For one, you may want others to see them. You may want to allow books to make a statement to your house guests, for they do an excellent job at this.

With a collection of books profoundly displayed for all to see, you provide a way for interest to be piqued and conversation to be started. Books on display showcase the interests and personality of their owners.

A purposeful display for your books allows you even more opportunity to put your unique style out there. With bookshelves or even more creative methods of display, you have greater flexibility to inject personality into interior design than is available in most areas of the home.

Putting your books on display, you put yourself on display. It can therefore carry a lot of personal meaning, if you put that into it.

You don’t have to make it incredibly meaningful if you don’t want to though. Professional interior designers often use books to fulfill a strictly aesthetic function.

Bookstores will even sell books by size or color to be used as purely decorative objects as fits a particular vision. If you simply want to reach an interior design ideal, books on display are a great way to do this.

What Can Make Your Book Display Really Stand Out

If you’re ready to pull your books out of storage and start creating a really beautiful display, you should know that your options are by no means limited.

You can just get some bookshelves and start lining the books down the rows, but there are also so many other exciting things you could do. Don’t be afraid to truly delve into the wide variety of possibilities that exist. 

Staying Simple to Showcase the Titles

Of course, sometimes the best possibilities are the simplest ones. You can shine a spotlight on the titles of your book collection themselves by not taking any other elements of the display too far.

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With some simple bookshelves, everything else can fade away to make the books the real stars. Other great ways to highlight the actual books are with planned placements of coffee table books and certain books turned outward on the shelf so that the whole cover can be seen.

Using What You Have

Plain bookshelves may not work with every home though. Some spaces are limited on spots to store books and some rooms may just call for something different.

When the situation isn’t necessarily ideal, you have to get creative. There is always a place for displaying books, but you will sometimes have to really put those interior design skills to use.

Think of spaces that aren’t primarily meant for but that can have alternative uses as storage for your book display.

Place them under a bench and you’ve now made that a cozy reading seat. Stack them along window sills in a way that will keep them safe from the sunlight and the books can add another lovely element to the view.

You might also just put books upon other books near your bed or another area where you might, at any point, be reading them.

Even little nooks like the space between staircase posts and crannies where a small shelf can still fit will work for interesting places to find books.

Showing Originality and Creativity

Wherever you put your books, displaying them always offers a great chance to include your own personality and style into the effort.

Fun bookends, functionally, hold books upright, but are also an aesthetic element that gives you another opportunity for creativity. You might use these and also figurines or small plants as bookshelf decoration.

Or you can go even further with your creativity and do something truly unique. Some really cool book display ideas you can see others doing include chairs made out of a bookcase, hanging bookshelves in which the books actually hang down from strings, and entire closets transformed into book storage reading alcoves. You might do something similar, but the most creative approach would be to come up with something all on your own.

Building New Book Displays for a Beautiful House

However you display your books, if you focus on making the book display beautiful, you can increase the beauty of the entire house.

For years, people have given a lot of thought to the way they store their books. Elaborate displays for the home library are not some new interior design trend or anything that will be going away because of technology’s rise.

Books are here to stay, and so are the efforts to display them in pleasing ways. Even if most of us can’t have the book lover’s dream of the Beauty and Beast library, we can still make our attempts. Perhaps we even really will discover something beautiful in a simple home library.