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book page wedding bouquets on offbeat bride alternative wedding ideas from Offbeat Wed (formerly Offbeat Bride)
These custom paper flower wedding bouquets are from Etsy seller TreeTownPaper

This week we're paying homage to the academics, the bookworms, the card-carrying library loiterers, and the literati among our readers. Last week we got to peek at some literary wedding invitations that totally whet my appetite for this theme week. We're showcasing bookish wedding ideas including decor made from book pages, bookish cake toppers, table numbers from vintage books, and even a Scrabble cake!

If you're worried about destroying books to make these? Librarians would like you to know it's not only OK to kill books for crafts projects… when you go for book-destroying bookish wedding ideas and crafts, you're actually doing them a favor.

jane austin wedding invitations bookish wedding ideas on offbeat bride alternative wedding ideas from Offbeat Wed (formerly Offbeat Bride)
Jane Austen wedding invitations
literary wedding seating chart bookish wedding ideas on offbeat bride alternative wedding ideas from Offbeat Wed (formerly Offbeat Bride)
Literary wedding seating chart
bconfetti 042212 alternative wedding ideas from Offbeat Wed (formerly Offbeat Bride)
What if instead of rice, people tossed book confetti made from decommissioned library books? Literary AND biodegradable!
book-cake-topper
Adorable bookish cake toppers. Source: etsy.com
literary wedding invitations bookish wedding ideas from offbeat bride alternative wedding ideas from Offbeat Wed (formerly Offbeat Bride)
Library book wedding invitations
book-placecards
Vintage books as table numbers from Etsy
book-table-numbers
Another take on table numbers — this time with pop-up type! Source: greerloves.blogspot.com
book page hair comb bookish wedding ideas on offbeat bride alternative wedding ideas from Offbeat Wed (formerly Offbeat Bride)
Book page hair comb
booklet-placecards
Sweet mini booklet place cards.
edgar allen poe wedding bouquet bookish wedding ideas offbeat bride alternative wedding ideas from Offbeat Wed (formerly Offbeat Bride)
Edgar Allen Poe pages wedding bouquet
book-mobile
This bibliophile mobile is amazing! Source: etsy.com via Julie on Pinterest
book-guest-book
A dictionary guest book: circle words that will remind the couple of the wedding day. D'aww! Source: southernliving.com via Michelle on Pinterest
book page leaf garland bookish wedding ideas on offbeat bride alternative wedding ideas from Offbeat Wed (formerly Offbeat Bride)
This garland is made from book pages!

Want tons more literary & bookish wedding ideas? CLICK HERE!

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Comments on Bookish wedding ideas for all of you bibliophiles [UPDATED!]

  1. wow! this completely blew me away too. concidering I am on my second attempt at making a book ringbearer “thingie”! Wish me luck!

  2. Love all of this! Especially the place-cards and books as signage. Ideas brewing over here! Thanks for sharing. 🙂

  3. Our ring bearer “pillow” was a montage of Harry Potter pages. Dont worry, the book was in really bad shape before I ripped a single page out.

    • Right? I could literally repurpose TWO copies of every single book in this series and turn them into something. They’re held together with duct tape as it is… haha!

    • Make a photocopy of the parts you like and use that if you’re uncomfortable cutting it up. I can’t imagine authors would be upset about their pages being used in a loving homage.

      • I’m sure we all know that! I think some of us library-fiend/researching academics/overall book lovers have this weird issue with defacing books! I’ve bought “clean” copies of books I’ve loved after annotating the crap out of them… 😛 I think some of us might just have some book related OCD…

        • At least there are tons of other ways to incorporate the love of books: in the vows, as favors, stacked up for all to see! 🙂

        • I have a hard time cutting into books as well but that ring book up there is mine. What I did, is buy a very used book. I had to go through it and erase some of the markings! I made sure that book was good and loved. Our card box was going to be made out of books and I just couldn’t cut into them. I ended up buying a cardboard box book from Michael’s and using that. The books are on either side of it sort of like bookends.

    • We photocopied the books we used for our flowers and centerpieces and then aged them using tea bags and cut them up. I would never ruin one of my Harry Potter Books. lol

    • I was actually having the same problem while trying to figure out how to make some book decorations for my upcoming wedding. Just last week, my fiance found that some of his books had been irrevocably damaged while in storage, so I’ll be using the leftover bits of the already ruined books for some of my projects. Making lemonade out of lemons and whatnot.

  4. Our centerpieces were stacks of old books and we used encyclopedias (numbers) as our table numbers. No book destruction for us and hand drawn bookmarks as favors. Book weddings are the best!

  5. I can’t believe you didn’t post any actual book shaped wedding cakes. I saw some pictures a while back and was hooked. I showed them to my bookfiend fiance and he agreed. Our wedding cake will be a stack of our favorite books, with each book being a different flavor of cake. That’s about the only thibg we have planned so far.

  6. I love this post and this whole themed week. I appreciate that the images used on this post are linked back not only to Pinterest but to their original sources (I know this is important to you). When I look into some of the other pins on the account, though, they’re linked to offbeatbride.ning.com or tribe.offbeatwed.com which can’t be accessed if you’re not a tribe member. So that makes it pretty tough to trace those pins back to their original sources. Is there a way around this? Am I missing something?

    • You must be looking at some old pins from our earliest days on Pinterest, before we had our pinning policies established.

      Not only do we no longer pin from the Tribe, but as soon as Pinterest added the meta name=”pinterest” content=”nopin” function, we added it to the Tribe so that NO ONE can pin images from the site, out of respect for members’ privacy.

      If you have specific pins you’re concerned about, contact us directly to discuss.

      • I must be looking at very old pins. It’s good to know your current policies have already fixed this problem. Thanks, Ariel.

  7. We’re having a literary themed wedding.
    I spoke to my local charity bookshop who gave me two huge bags full of books they wouldn’t/couldn’t sell for various reasons in return for a donation.

    The books were going to go unread or scrapped anyway so I don’t feel bad giving them new life at our wedding!

  8. I’m actually planning to purchase new copies of my favorite books to deface for wedding decor. The way I see it, if I buy more copies of the book, my beloved authors (or their estates) make more money for their awesome work. 😀

  9. Yes, it makes me so sad to see perfect condition vintage books with paint all over them, using them for decoration I love, but cutting them and painting, writing all over them, it just breaks my heart- poor books.

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