How To Make Your Next #Shelfie Pic Instagram Gold

On decorating & sorting your shelves to make your books pop.

Author:: Tabatha - West Virginia University
Publish date:: Nov 11, 2017

I’ll be the first to confess: I’ve bought books I’ll never read just for their pretty colors. The stories inside might not interest me at all and I might feel a little bad for never giving them a chance, but they look amazing.

On my shelves, plain, minimalistic covers meet weary, decades old collections of fairy tales. Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk meets The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Fake leather spines rest against paperbacks. And then I Instagram them all and hashtag it #shelfie.

This CF guide is to show you how to organize books to give them the Instagram worthy pictures that they deserve.

3 Ways to Style Books for a #Shelfie:

#1: Space It Out

Less is more. Spacing out your books will make it seem more organized and planned. You can stack a few vertically, as seen above, or space them in interesting ways, interspersed with accessories, as shown below:

#2: Accessorize!

Decorate your shelves with trinkets, plants, picture frames, you name it! Use the extra space on your shelves to show off your own personal touches. How cute is this Outlander quote popped out?

#3: Use Cool Shelves

Invisible shelves, interactive shelves, colorful shelves, the possibilities are endless!

5 Ways to Organize Books for a #Shelfie:

#1: From Best to Worst

There are the books that you have to be in a certain place or mood to want to read, and then there are the books that were an absolute joy to find and delve into. Try this out and rank your books by how much you loved them!

Pros: You get to see your reading tastes laid out in real time, and if you're looking for a book to read on the fly, you could just grab one from your most loved.

Cons: You could frequently change your mind about what you like, meaning you'd have to reorganize often.

#2: By Date:

This way of sorting gives an interesting sense of how far back in history your books rank.

Pros: This is especially useful if you read a lot of classic books, where the publishing date would lay out your books by era, or autobiographies, where your books would give you a timeline of history.

Cons: This is less useful if you mostly read modern books, where it's all going to be around the same time.

#3: Who Cares? Have the spines just face the wall!

I see this design on Pinterest from time to time, and there isn't one that goes by without me pinning it to about a hundred different boards. It's so different than anything you see, and I just love it. You can also mix it up and have some books facing forward and some backward, as seen above.

Pros: It's unique and looks really cool.

Cons: Finding the book you want would suddenly be really, really hard.

#4: By Emotion

Sort your books by the emotions they make you feel. Is it a warm, feel good story? Is it a thriller? Is it an adventure?

Textbooks, of course, will be exempt from this organization style and can be piled into a corner that you can forget about until you really, really need them.

Pros: It'll make things so much easier when you want to read but don't know which to pick. Just match it to your mood!

Cons: The books that take you on a roller coaster ride through twenty or so different emotions during the course of the story could pose a challenge to this system, but you could always create a section just for them!