Books are not only the best way to sharpen your mind; they also make for great collector’s items. Something about the smell of paper and ink, the feeling of excitement every time you go through the contents list of a new book, and the rush of diving deep into a book for the hours and hours to come just makes you want to get more and more books.

In the modern day, however, books are disappearing faster and faster, being replaced with more digestible and portable sources like e-book readers. Good old-fashioned paperback books need saving folks! And it is our job to make sure that happens.

One way of doing that is by using our fancy bookshelves to do exactly what their name suggests. Many times bookshelves become this surrogate space for you to show off everything else other than books. This includes your action figurines, your overused bookends, medals and trophies, and other decorative items. So, in this blog, we’ll learn how to have filled up bookshelves without making even the slightest compromise on style and aesthetics. Let’s dig in!

1. Alternating between vertical and horizontal arrangements

The best way to create a fresh looking arrangement is by getting creative about how you stack your books. There are so many ideas you could try out. For example, you could start by stashing books vertically according to height, symmetrically from left and right, leaving space in the between where you could stack them according to height in a pyramid type pile.

You could put a showpiece of some sort on top of this pile. There are numerous ways to get creative about arranging books based on their alignment alone. You could try different variations for different shelves to give it a fresh feel. There is also scope for flipping the books and face them from the side of the white pages. This will create interesting visual dynamics.

2. Arranging by Color

If you have a vast collection of a lot of books (exactly the audience this blog is targeted towards), you must find it nearly impossible to find books when you want to look for a specific book. Unless you’re willing to setup up our bookshelves alphabetically, chronologically, or numerically, the best way to find books in a gigantic collection is to go by color of the book cover. This kind of arrangement would be perfect for you if you have books that can be put in certain color columns.

3. Coloring the Back of your Bookshelf

Using the tip above this one, colors could play a very vital role in your decorative schemes. You could take that up a notch by painting the back of the shelves in contrasting colors. This would give the room a nice dynamic balance of colors. You could also just color the back of the shelves regardless of your arrangement schemes.

4. Using Decorative Items

You could set up shelves thematically according to what the books on that shelf are based on, and by doing so you could decorate the shelves with things that go along with the theme of the particular shelf. If you’re the kind of reader who has a specific taste in the style of books, this tip should be easy for you to employ. For example, if you have a shelf filled with books about World War 2, you could also decorate it with artifacts and items representing World War 2.