A book display cabinet or a bookshelf—which should you choose?
For several years now, we’ve been increasingly eager to display our personal book collections in glass-fronted bookcases. This trend arrived along with the popularity of Scandinavian style and has really taken root here, gradually reducing the popularity of traditional bookshelves. Is a glass bookcase really a great solution, and in what situations will a traditional bookshelf still have the edge?
Article at a Glance
A bookcase, bookshelf, or wall-mounted shelves are essential pieces of furniture in a home with a large collection of books.
You can set up a home library in practically any room in the house—in the living room, study, bedroom, or even the hallway.
A backlit bookcase will elegantly showcase your home library collection, and in the evening, it will fill the living room with soft light and a romantic atmosphere.
A tall bookcase is an excellent solution if you want to store a large number of books in one place.
Bookcase in the living room
The living room is the most impressive space in the entire house, as well as the room where we relax and entertain guests. It’s no wonder, then, that true literature lovers want their books to be displayed right here, ideally beautifully showcased in an elegant living room bookcase. Everything looks better behind glass, including neatly arranged books. Modern display cabinets usually also feature built-in lighting, which makes your home library look even more impressive. If you don’t have a display cabinet with built-in lighting, you can install the lighting yourself. Installing LED lights is very straightforward.
However, an elegant look isn’t everything. The biggest advantage a book display case has over a bookshelf is that you can close it, protecting your books from dust and dirt. And if you have small children at home whose dirty little hands love to grab things that aren’t theirs, a living room display cabinet will be a perfect fit. Living room display cabinets often feature lockable cabinets and/or drawers as well—you can use them to store all sorts of small living room items, making the piece a multifunctional piece of furniture.
What do modern living room display cabinets look like? Of course, they stand on legs—slender and light, slanted, or sturdy, geometric supports. Increasingly, they’re made of smoked, tempered glass, which offers greater impact resistance. Modern metal display cabinets in the loft style are extremely popular. Display cabinets in wood tones, as well as the ever-fashionable black and gray, are also popular.
Where’s the best place to set up a book display?
There are really a lot of places where you can set up a display. In fact, it all depends on how large your home library is and what kinds of books it contains. If you have a lot of books, you can organize them by subject and place each section in a different room—for example, non-fiction and fiction in the living room, cookbooks in the kitchen, and mysteries and contemporary fiction in the bookshelf in the bedroom. If you have a home office, place a modern display cabinet in it to showcase textbooks and specialized literature related to your field of work.
And if you dream of having all your books in one place, choose a tall, wide bookcase that can hold your entire book collection. To keep such a large piece of furniture organized, you can arrange your books by topic, alphabetically, or even by color. It’s also a good idea to place books from the same series next to each other.
A Home Library in a Child’s Room
“A child who reads will become an adult who thinks,” a classic writer once observed, and the importance of these words cannot be overstated. But reading to children frequently also means a large number of books that need to be stored somewhere in the child’s room. Let’s remember that children’s rooms are often small, sometimes located in the attic, and always filled with a lot of stuff. So what’s the best way to organize a child’s little library? There are plenty of ideas. The most popular ones are probably the traditional ones bookshelves, on which you can display all items in the traditional way—that is, vertically or horizontally with the spines facing forward. This option is very practical because it can accommodate a truly substantial home library. Books can also be placed on shelves mounted one above the other, above a bed, desk, or dresser. Recently, shelves where books are displayed with the covers facing forward have gained popularity. This arrangement is especially recommended for young children who cannot yet read and recognize their books by the pictures on the covers. The downside of these shelves is that they can hold no more than a dozen or so books.
In the rooms of older children, however, books are increasingly being displayed in backlit glass display cases. Is this a good solution? Yes, provided you’re certain your child is old enough not to cause a dangerous situation involving glass. We definitely do not recommend glass display cabinets for the rooms of children under 10 years of age. And this is precisely the exception where a classic bookshelf beats a glass display cabinet.
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