10 Tips for Styling Your Home With Books

Books are not only educational, they're also a colorful way to add height, texture and interest to vignettes throughout your home. Our designer tips will help you use them to smartly boost your home's style.

January 14, 2022

By: Marian Parsons

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“A home without books is a body without a soul.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero. A collection of well-loved books brings personality to a home and tells you a lot about the people who live there. While the pages within may be viewed as either academic or entertaining, books are also part of the decor, lending their style, color and texture to even the smallest vignettes.

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Use Books as Decor

Books, especially old ones, are a classic styling element on open shelving or horizontal surfaces. Leatherbound books add warmth and history while cloth-bound books add texture and color. When shopping for vintage and antique tomes, select volumes that are the right scale, color and material to relate visually to the other items in your display.

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Stack Them to Add Height

So much of creating a visually pleasing arrangement relies on composition and using pieces in a variety of sizes, materials, shapes and heights. Books are a wonderful way to add height to an item in a vignette, acting like a pedestal. As a bonus, it puts the books' colorful covers on display.

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Tips for Collecting Old Books

There is a whole world of enthusiasts who collect antique books for their appearance, along with their historical value. Books bound in materials like leather, vellum and linen have a beauty and patina that's just not found in new books. Flea markets are a great place to pick up old books at a good price if you’re not picky about condition, edition, author, etc. To shop for higher-end collectible books from more knowledgeable dealers, search online marketplaces that specialize in antiques or websites that specifically sell rare books.

Assemble a Home Library

While public libraries are an amazing resource, there's a lot of value in building a home library on your favorite topics of interest. The internet can provide a wealth of information and inspiration, but in most cases, books must go through a more rigorous editing process to be published. This makes their information a bit more reliable than the average internet blog post or tip shared in a forum. And it’s also nice to get information and inspiration from a place other than a screen — no charging cable required.

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Arrange Books by Subject

Once you start building a home library, arranging the books is a hot topic, especially with the rise in popularity of displaying books in a rainbow or even with the pages turned out. While you can use the Dewey Decimal system, most home libraries are arranged in a way that makes sense to the books' owner — either so the books are easy to locate by topic or so they look visually pleasing or a little bit of both. A tried-and-true way to organize books in a home library is by subject. This can mean reserving a shelf for one specific topic, merging like-topics, or even storing books only in the room where they are likely to be utilized as a resource — cookbooks in the kitchen, business books in the office, novels in the family room, etc.

See More Photos: 45 Must-Know Tips for Styling Your Built-In Bookshelves

Or, Arrange Books by Color

Arranging books by color is a popular way to make a jumble of colors and textures more visually pleasing. This is an effective way to make the collection more decorative, but it can also make it hard to find books on a specific topic. If organizing books by color, try grouping them by subject first, then sorting them by color.

Or, Even Arrange Books by Size

Arranging books by size also makes an arrangement more pleasing to the eye and, as an added bonus, it maximizes shelf space. Books that are too tall for the shelf can be stored sideways in a stack, acting as a bookend for smaller books. A bookshelf with adjustable shelves can also be put to better use and arranged around the height of each row of books, maximizing book display space and minimizing wasted area.

Leave Books Out for Guests

When setting up a comfortable guest room, consider adding a stack of books on a variety of subjects for your guests to enjoy. Pick a few short, quick reads, books on interesting topics, visually appealing books, and perhaps one on a local place or subject. Your guests will appreciate the thoughtfulness and the opportunity to get to know you a little bit better through your book choices.

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Coffee Table (or Ottoman) Books

Coffee table (ottoman) books are large, photo-heavy books that are ideal to have sitting out where they frequently can be enjoyed and thumbed through by family and friends. Fill a large coffee table with a few stacks of books on a variety of subjects to offer a buffet of books to your guests (and to yourself). Rotate the books based on your current interests or even to reflect the season.

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Building a Resource Library

A resource library will look a little different in every home, depending on the interests of the people who live there. The collected books might be related to health, art, history, science, business, food, fashion, travel, and more. Build a resource library on a subject that interests you with a goal to buy books you want to revisit over and over again. Shop for used books at estate and garage sales, plus book sales at your local library to build a collection on a budget. To share your books with others, use a stamp to label your books and a system to keep track of who “checked out” the book.

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