How to Personalize a Bookshelf

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By Gail Martin
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Vintage cookie jar separates books

Bookshelves take on their owner's personality. Besides the range of titles and the way you organize it, express your personality in the choice of bookends. Here are ideas to personalize a bookshelf.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Step 1

I like my books separated by authors, rather than all huddled together. So through the 60 plus years of saving books I have found some unique bookends to do the job of keeping our favorite author’s writings together.

The old time Kansas schoolbooks that I have found mostly at estate sales, I hold together with bookends that are replicas of the school desks like my husband used in the one-room school he attended. They even have two miniature school books with each of them.
Step 2

On the long top shelf where books about Abraham Lincoln fill the whole shelf, I added a pair of heavy bookends depicting the Lincoln Memorial. Between some of the different Lincoln biographers, I added a gold bust of ‘Abe’ sold by Avon and a small, square bottle, decorated with a black silhouette of Lincoln and capped with a gold eagle, separates another group of his books.
Step 3

I found miniature birdhouses that hold our nature books together. This section includes bird guides and insect books. In that section I placed several Foxfire books that feature the lives of the Appalachian Mountain people and Euell Gibbons book, “Stalking the Wild Asparagus.” What fun we had hunting edible food along the back roads after we retired.
Step 4

I selected a couple of large pieces of petrified wood that we found on 4-H geology field trips. By adding felt to the bottoms so they don’t scratch the wooden shelves, they make attractive bookends and are certainly heavy enough to hold many books together.
Step 5

I even use the mantel clock that my sister and her husband made out of local, Kansas Black Walnut for us one Christmas.
Step 6

On one bookshelf, I use old blue-green canning jars to hold categories of cookbooks apart. In one jar I collect buttons; in another I drop marbles when I find them and in some I put sand to make them heavier. I like to separate all the canning books in one place and cookbooks published by churches and families in another.