And they were free books – so why the heck not, right?!

I decided to make a decor piece for my mantle. I have seen so many cute pictures with shelves of painted books floating around the Pinterest world, but I personally never had any books that I felt comfortable painting.

Until now!

I grabbed the thickest hardcover books I could find. I also tried to grab them in different heights.

The point of this piece is that is not wide and only appears to be full books. This is handy when the shelf you want to use the display on is narrow. It’s also lighter and easier to move around. Plus, it’s decor. I am painting them and NOT actually reading them ever!

Note: I used my circular saw to cut the spines from the books against my better judgement. I did not really measure. I simply cut the spines off in “around” the same places on each book.

I wanted the end result to look realistic and imperfect. Just like me!

Would I say this is the easiest way to do it? I’m not so sure. It was definitely messy. And would I say I *may* have clogged my saw’s dust bag and caused my saw to overheat which resulted in me having a complete panic attack?

Yes, yes I would.

Next I built my frame.

My husband and I are no-shame wood hoarders. We keep any and all scrap wood from projects.

It comes in handy so often and honestly, we’re too cheap to throw away something we paid good money for!

I gathered up a few scrap pieces, cut them to size with my saw and screwed them together. The bottom strip is to hold the book spines and the side pieces are cut 2×4’s that will serve as anchors to keep the entire piece together.

Here is the finished frame. Nothing professional here folks. Just a bit of book decor fun on a budget of FREE!

I kept 2 books off to the side for the end pieces. I was lucky enough to find 2 of the exact same books so I just used those.

I removed the hardcover jacket completely from the book pages. This was crazy easy and really just involved ripping it off.

Hindsight – I probably could have done this for all of the books, used wood pieces to “fake” the inside of the books and avoided causing unwanted damage to my saw

(for those of you concerned, she still works. Just needed a bit of time to cool off -whew! I got out of explaining that one to the hubby!)

I measured how wide I wanted the end books to be, marked with a ruler and used a box cutter to remove the unwanted portion of the book jacket.

I wrapped the cut-to-size spine ends around the wood piece. I did choose to screw these pieces in to make sure they were secure.

I just screwed straight through the jacket into the wood.

I attached everything from this point on with hot glue. It’s mostly attaching cardboard and paper to other pieces of cardboard and paper so superglue works perfectly fine!

Each book was glued on both sides to the book next to it.

Once they were glued together, I painted the whole piece white.

Note: the finished piece is top heavy. But, it’s a decor item meant to sit back against a wall or shelf back.

I distressed the paint a bit with a sandpaper block because that’s the look I like. I am undecided if I will add any sort of numbers or lettering to the spines. For now, I kind of like it as it is. The original hardcover colors show through in the distressed sections and I am loving the contrast.

In true disclosure, I will most likely change my mind……many times!