One thing we always "celebrate" with some activity is Teen Read Week, designated by the American Library Association as the second week in October. In the past, we have featured a writing contest, and may do so again (we had a pretty brilliant idea yesterday); but this year we also came up with an idea to help us with display and give the teens a creative outlet to share their favorite books: Shelf Talkers.
You see these more commonly in bookstores (mostly independent ones) than you do libraries, for some reason. There will be a display with "staff picks" cards, and the best are not the typewritten ones on pre-made forms, but hand-made, fancifully embellished comments that draw your eye to the book and make you want to read it.
Rather than do a display (since at Anarda's branch she is lamentably short on display space), we decided to compromise and make them hang over the shelves like the pre-made ones in little plastic cases, but to encourage the teens to personalize them (and not use the plastic cases!). With that in mind, I made up a simple form.
I divided a manila-colored sheet of thin cardstock into quarters, at 4.25x5.5 inches. Then I put a dotted line across the short side at the 1.25-inch mark, so once the folding part is folded over the shelf and taped there, the shelf-talker itself will be approximately square. And then I looked at my list of books on Goodreads and made shelf-talkers for three of the books on there.
I already know what Anarda will tell me: "Some of us don't draw." So I plan to do a few more with simple embellishments like squiggly borders or lettering and no illustrations. But I had fun with these.
Manila cardstock, LePen 0.5, watercolor, colored pencils.
