Book Storage in the Bedroom

My girls have lots of books; it comes with having a teacher librarian for a mother and a teacher librarian for a nonna. I regularly sort through our books with PudStar and we cull (every good librarian culls!) and sort them out: library books; our books; books to go to ChickPea; books to go to shelves in other rooms. Like toys, we rotate books.

I’m a big fan of forward facing storage for children’s books, especially for pre-readers. Children’s books stored on regular bookshelves just end up all being pulled off. Children can’t read spines, and young children choose, or identify a favourite book by the cover. “You can’t judge a book by it’s cover”? Rot. Tell that to a child. Anyway…secretly even adults judge books by covers.

So in PudStar and ChickPea’s bedrooms all the books face forward. Except for a few special ones in ChickPea’s room which were mine as a child and are up high and out of her reach between beautiful book ends.

IKEA has fabulous spice racks which are a whopping $2.49 and are the best thing ever as a small bookshelf in a room. If you need something bigger, the IKEA picture ledge is fantastic. The grandkids bedroom at nonna and papas has this ledge for the five granddaughters books.

PudStar has two of the IKEA spice racks in her room in her book area, and one next to her bed for books she is reading at night. One of the one’s in the book area is reserved for library books so we don’t lose them. Even librarians get library fines sometimes and I’m not a fan of the library fine.

If you don’t want to attach things to the wall, square containers on the floor are perfect. Regular library users will know that all the picture books in libraries are now in these. I considered buying a proper library picture book storage combo for PudStars bedroom but Dan said the house already contained far too much commercial library furniture. I’ll work on this.