How to Decorate with Books

Featured Pro: Kristan Cunningham
Category: Home Décor
Time: 4:26


KRISTAN CUNNINGHAM: Hi, there. I’m Kristan Cunningham, and this is another GMC Trade Secret, brought to you by the new GMC Acadia.

So don’t we all love the look of a beautiful classic library full of beautiful leather-bound volumes of old gorgeous books? Of course we do. But none of us actually have those books. For the most part we have, you know, Computers for Dummies and a bunch of stuff that people gave us. And none of it matches and none of it’s really all that beautiful. But we need it.

So I’m going to show you how to cover those books, make them look a little more uniform, and really beautiful. The first one is going to be with craft paper. And that’s right. This is exactly what you did in grade school. It’s exactly how you covered your textbooks – no different. But the gorgeousness here comes from seeing all these books lined up together.

So the first thing we’re going to do is measure out our paper. And what you want to do is take the width of your book times two, plus the spine, and add a few. So this one looks to be about five inches, so 10 plus an inch, 11, add a few; let’s say 16. That way we’ve got some room for the flaps to come around, like so. Okay.

So now we’re just going to wrap it right in place and literally fold it around the edges – so simple. So not so exciting. It’s a book. It’s covered in brown craft paper. But when this becomes gorgeous is when you see tons of them lined up on a shelf together and they’re all pretty and uniform. So that’s how it looks in craft paper.

We’ve also got the option of butcher paper. And I like butcher and craft paper because they are both so darn inexpensive. All right, slice that guy. Fold that bad boy right over, and done. Now, you might want to tape these. Don’t, because you’ll rip the inside of your books. And then when you close it and when you open it, it’ll bunch all up. It won’t want to move. Don’t do it.

Okay, so now we’ve got the craft paper. We’ve got the butcher paper. The last guy we’re going to use is vellum. Okay, so with this one, the look is a little more transparent. So we can see the title. It’s still there, but it’s a little more faded. It’s kind of behind a little bit of a ghost of paper.

Well, what’s so pretty about this is when you see a hundred of them or so together, they all become very pastel and very soft. So put that guy there. Now, obviously, with that one we can see the title. It’s truly just about knocking down the color or the shine on the book itself. But with the craft – with the butcher paper and with the craft paper, we’ve covered our title altogether.

Now, if you have a lot of self-help books or books that you don’t really want anybody to read the titles on, you can do code names and write whatever you want, or you can stick to whatever the title actually is. This one is, I think, Birds and How They Get Their Names. So we can write that directly onto the spine or we can use - what I like are these mailing labels. And you can get them at any office supply store. And what’s so great about these is that, once you get this on here – it came up, what, about a quarter inch there?

So we have a hundred more books and we do all of them at exactly the same height. Even though we have different thicknesses and different heights between all our books, we have this one thing that’s constant, that’s the same. So it keeps a nice, uniform look by the time you get a gajillion of them on your shelves.

Now, I know what you’re saying. Oh, Kristan, that’s not very exciting. It’s just a book and paper, and it doesn’t look very exciting now. But wait until you see them on the shelves when we have all kinds of them. Let’s get inside and see how that looks altogether.

And here’s how they all look in our library. We have the butcher paper on the end, very clean. Then we have the craft paper with the paper labels. Then we have the vellum, which is kind of that ghost book effect. And finally, we have the ones collected by color groupings. So you can have sort of blues and greens mixed together, yellows and oranges. It doesn’t have to be exact. But as long as you have the general shades, the look is so much more cohesive and so much neater.

I’m Kristan Cunningham, and that’s your GMC Trade Secret about how to decorate with books.