This will be a super quick post, but I recently came up with a really fun “book display” idea at my library, and I figured I’d share it here! I’m also including all of the materials I created for FREE for you to download and re-use if you want.

Book displays are not one of my strengths as a librarian, so I don’t actually do them that frequently. Not physical displays, anyway. I’m very good at keeping our Instagram & TikTok full of digital book displays, and I really enjoy doing that. When it comes to physical displays in the library, though, well that’s not really my forte and I probably only think of 2-3 per year to do. I was so excited this year when I got a brainstorm idea and actually thought of a cool and relatively easy display idea. Finding books with great opening lines and adding a speech bubble to them with their opening lines as a way of “hooking” students!

I hope this idea helps others, and for those of you at high school level, or with YA book collections, please feel free to download my LENGTHY document full of 84 different book bubbles, and reuse any of the speech bubbles that you’d like to.

If you’re wanting to make your own and wondering how I did mine, I simply made them in Canva.com by adding a speech bubble element and then adding the text on top. I just flipped through a bunch of books in my library looking for any that had particularly engaging or alluring first sentences.