Are you obsessed with books? Do you dream about marrying your favorite fictional character? Do you feel like books just understand you? Well, apparently we can’t marry our perfect fictional boyfriends, so we have to settle for the next best thing, another person who loves books as much as us.
I got pretty lucky, I met my husband online and our love for reading and writing brought us together. We both love writing (he’s published, I’m a procrastinator) and we both have a butt-load of books that we’ve been hoarding. So of course when it came time to say I do, we both wanted to incorporate our love for books into our wedding.
Though our theme was mostly Halloween (we got married that day last year), we managed to find little ways of including our love for books without ending up with two different themes.
Engagement Pictures
Our engagement pictures were pretty fun, if you’re looking for poses to incorporate your books into, just go to Pinterst and search ‘book poses’ and you’ll pretty much be covered.
Here’s a few of my favorite pictures from our engagement shoot that included books. The books we used were either my husbands German bible or (surprisingly) old German dictionaries.
Save the Dates
Our save the dates were very inexpensive, we went through the same company that does Stu’s bookmarks for his novels and had plenty left over because you have to buy them in bulk. We chose bookmarks because we thought it was a useful item that guests aren’t just going to toss once the wedding is over. Plus we love reading and we’ll never run out of bookmarks now, between his novel ones and the save the dates, we probably have over 5000 bookmarks in our house.
Wedding Invitations
Our wedding invites were pretty pricy but the store where we purchased them was very cute. To my surprise we weren’t pretty plain but very book-ish. We got a plain white card stock and put the wording on as if it were a book page. We had a quote on it from The Nightmare Before Christmas (most of our wedding music was from the soundtrack), the chapter heading, the actual invite and then the page number at the bottom. These ran us about $500, but I don’t regret them because they were so gorgeous. As a wedding gift, someone even had our wedding invitation turned into a picture frame, so cool!
Engagement Ring and Wedding Bands
This is where my husband amazes me. He didn’t want to buy just any engagement ring at a jeweler. He wanted to make something one-of-a-kind, so him and his brother talked over a design and then went to the jeweler. The first jeweler he went to actually drew out the engagement ring but wanted to charge him an arm and a leg for it, so he took the design (jeweler who created it gave the okay) to another family-friend jeweler. He said he could definitely do it and he also designed our wedding bands. The engagement ring sits on my finger like an open book while our wedding bands are supposed to just look like book pages.
Wedding Flowers
I was so excited about incorporating books into our wedding. When I was browsing through Pinterst, I saw a wedding bouquet made out of book pages and I loved it! Sadly, I’m not that crafty and the idea of me ripping pages out of a book and then trying to make a bouquet was a bit depressing so I went to Etsy to search for one. I found a shop on there called Diddlebug and the owner was great to work with! I ordered five boutonnieres, two single flowers, two corsages, and one bridal bouquet. My price came to about $250 dollars which is cheap for wedding flowers (so I’ve been told), and they don’t die!! It was a cute little wedding memento for our bridal party/parents. Everyone complimented them. Once the wedding was over, I contacted Diddlebug again because she makes book page flower Christmas tree ornaments. So now every Christmas I can hang that up.
Charlene of Diddlebug can add personal touches on her items so they match your wedding theme perfectly. She really gets into making them for each and every bride. I would get a few emails during the process where she’d ask if she could add a feather or certain gears. Of course I agreed to all of her suggestions. For mine we added a pirate skull cameo from another Etsy shop, some gears, a clock face, and some feathers. She also added a skeleton key to my husbands boutonniere to make his unique. We also chose purple and black for our ribbon. Diddlebug has many books to choose from and she can also order books for an additional fee, we chose all fairy tale books.
If you do go this route, and you want to ‘preserve’ your bouquet and also display it, I recommend getting a football helmet case from Michael’s Crafts. The bouquet is bigger that you think! We have my bouquet in our bedroom.
Overall, I’m very happy with how we included our love of books into our wedding. These are just a few examples of how we included them in our Halloween wedding, but the ideas are endless. I totally recommend making a account on pintrest and getting ideas there. As our guestbook we ordered a Shutterfly photo book with our engagement pictures in it. If you sign up, they’ll send out offers for a free one every now and then! That’s how we got ours. My brother-in-law and his wife also had a cool book idea. They bought a book on each of their hometowns and had guests sign in those. I sort of wish we would have did that with maybe a horror themed book or something.
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