Blind Date with a Book Display

After taking off from display making for the last month or so, I decided February was a good time to start fresh.

February has a lot of things going on so I could have gone in several directions (Women’s History, Black History, something else entirely). I knew I wanted to do something timely for the month but I also didn’t want to have the display empty out too quickly as books got checked out for assignments–we always get cleaned out for things like Black History month as kids get assigned related titles. Newer titles circulate too often for me to do a display with the Youth Media Award winners and honorees (many of which are checked out right now and not on shelves at all).

So I decided to go in a different direction with a Valentine’s Day themed display that could extend for longer if I don’t have time to make a new display right away when March starts.

As you can see I did a Blind Date with a Book display. As usual I headed over to PicMonkey to make a sign that I could mount on foam core. This time because I knew setting the books up would take some work I also decided to go ahead and use the same sign/theme for both displays I can make. PicMonkey has a whole sweetheart theme so it was easy to put this together. (One of my coworkers thought it might be too pink, but it is a blind date so I thought it should be romantic.)

After the display boards were set up it was time to pick books. I chose a combination of books I liked, books that had multiple copies on the shelves and older titles that I knew had a lower probability of being needed to fill reserve requests.

There are a lot of options for wrapping books. I decided to use printer paper in a few colors (I needed two sheets per book to get the coverage I needed) and wrapped the book in a sleeve so that each book could slide out but still look completely covered. I also cut a slot on the back of each book so the library barcode was visible for easy check out.

After the back was ready to go I turned the book over and wrote a little teaser for each book including either a question or some other pithy enticement.

I wrapped up twelve books (six for each display station). If the books all start to check out I also have spare materials to make more as needed.

Here’s one display all set up:

And here is the other:

I also like to include a book giveaway option with each display so I also added a little note asking people to tell a librarian what they think of their pick to win a free book. I’m not sure anyone will and I expect at least one person will talk about a book that is not in the display but I think that’s okay too.

I’m really excited about it and plan to use this idea a lot more in the future (already thinking ahead to Banned Books Week). What do you think of this display?

Try to guess some of the titles in the comments!