Encouraging reading with book displays

Themed displays are a great way to showcase your collection, entice visitors to your library, encourage new borrowing, and increase your own staff’s book collection knowledge.

Ideas for creating engaging, themed displays

Like most libraries, we create displays to showcase our collection and find our themed displays particularly effective.

Books featured in these displays dwindle quickly as library staff find new hidden gems for school loans and to read.

Make them relevant, fun, and inspiring

Significant events in the community are an easy way to get the ball rolling, with themed displays such as Christmas, Pride, and Waitangi Day.

There’s no reason for displays to be boring! Our recent display for Bird of the Year was a real hit, with the creator making meme posters to encourage voting for their favourite bird.

Book award winners are also an easy option, especially those celebrating local authors such as the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults and Storylines Notable Books.

Our display for welcoming in the New Year (shown above) aptly focused on the theme of ‘hope’ and was inspired by Read Brightly's article: 10 Books on Hope for Tweens. After the year that was 2020, it's been nice to delve into uplifting books that focus on kindness and the good in the world. Books were also chosen whose stories reminded us that hardships can be overcome.

Select from across the collection

As you can see from our photo of the display, we selected books from across our collection, including picture books, junior fiction, and non-fiction.

Great for librarians too!

Our librarians have been enjoying the warm fuzzies from reading these books as well as placing them in loans where they eagerly await young readers.

Find out more

Reader-friendly environments has more about how to create a welcoming library environment that encourages reading for pleasure.