On Saturday I took down a display of writing books I’d pulled to highlight our NaNoWriMo programs. I was surprised how few books had made it the last two weeks. It ended up being one of our most successful displays (in terms of checkouts) of the year, which goes to show you it never hurts to try something out of the ordinary or that you don’t anticipate doing well, because you just never know. I wanted to do something seasonal but not featuring holiday or wintry books. I got the idea for this “under the mistletoe” winter library display from the YALSA-bk listserv when Meredith from an Illinois library had put a call out for books that featured kissing on the covers for a display she was putting together.

“Under the Mistletoe” Teen Library Display

I go back and forth subscribing and unsubscribing to the listserv, because sometimes there are spammy posts clogging up my inbox or people get way off topic, but I love that in the span of a day a librarian can put a call out for some sort of help and get a lot of helpful responses, and I love that people share their ideas for programs, displays, etc. This week I was glad I saw the message, because I thought this was such a fun idea for a teen library display.

Though the initial idea and list featured books with characters kissing on the covers, a lot of the titles were already checked out, so I ended up including books with kissing in the the title, or books expressly about kissing, such as Laini Taylor’s Lips Touch, Three Times. This ended up being a well-balanced mix of older, more mature romances and more tween-friendly titles. There were even a few mystery/thrillers thrown in for good measure.

We hadn’t done an explicit romance display all year. We did “blind date with a book” for February and road trip books, outdoorsy books, and artsy books over the summer. I often find myself trying to come up with topics that will interest the teens who regularly hang out in the teen zone, but are more interested in gaming and socializing than browsing a display. Still, I don’t want to forget romance readers, and thought it was a time they had a display all to their own, but with a cute, eye-catching theme. 

THough I just made a simple sign, you could easily decorate with some real mistletoe (but you might not want to do that if you’re worried about PDA in the library, as some librarians on the YALSA-bk listserv recently were.) There are cute tutorials for felt mistletoe or DIY fake plant mistletoe.

What are some recent displays you’ve done or seen?