I thought this would be a post that I wrote after my wedding had taken place, after all the confetti had been tidied away, thank you notes had been penned, and photographs oooh-ed and aaahh-ed over, and I wanted to relive the excitement.

I was meant to be getting married in June.

That was the plan.

But coronavirus had other ideas.

Now there’s a little bit of a question mark over when we’ll get to do it. (There’s another blogpost in here on my opinion of unreasonable wedding suppliers, but I’ll save you the boredom).  We hope for June 2021, but that’s by the by.

To lift my spirits a bit, I thought I’d share with you some of the things I had planned for our big day, to make it a book themed wedding. I still have a few things up my sleeve so I won’t be spoiling anything for our guests – but I’m terrible at keeping secrets so I have to share somewhere.

As with anything wedding things can cost a lot, and this is where etsy, eBay, charity shops and a little bit of DIY fun have come into their own.

The obvious place to start is with invites. I was lucky enough to come across Feel Good Invites early on in my search. These are the ones they designed for us, and I love them so much. Even if book-themed stuff isn’t your thing, I would wholeheartedly recommend them to anyone. They’ve got loads of amazing designs and have been a joy to work with. We were really pleased with the speed of delivery and the quality of the final invites – and as someone who works in marketing and deals with a lot of printed material, I’m pretty hard to impress (No, this isn’t an ad, but they’re just brilliant). 

Although we haven’t been able to get to that stage, we were also going to get orders of service in the same design as well as the table and place names. (They do bookmark designs for place names, I mean, I am putty in their hands).

Which brings me nicely to the tables and decorations. Obviously there will be books. And also teacups, because I think I need to live up my blog name at all times. All the tables will be named after books. I’m not going to share them – yet! But they all have either significance to the people on the table (e.g. school related books for school friends…) or they’re a favourite of mine. My fiance isn’t really a reader, it’s not that I’ve just bullied him out of the proceedings! The top table name I will share, because it’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Well – I could hardly have anything else?

For decorations, I have been scouring ebay and charity shops for the classic style penguin books. It can be tricky to get hold of these for a reasonable price as they have become very fashionable for house decorations etc. That being said, if you don’t mind them looking a little shabby (which I didn’t), you can find them for a smaller price. It’s worth getting job lots which have a range of penguin books in (there have been a number of different designs over the years) – chances are you will get more of the type that you want for less than if you just try to buy sets of a specific type. It does depend how particular you are – I’m rather more on the shabby end of shabby-chic, so the mix match style didn’t bother me too much. You can get really nicely preserved penguin editions too, if you are prepared to spend a little more. My top tip here would be to look for any charity shop listings on eBay. They tend to be better value for money as well as having the feel good factor as it’s going towards a good cause.

We weren’t going to have book themed wedding favours, as we had something else in mind. (I had to let me non-reader fiance have some input). However, that didn’t stop me looking at them. Etsy was my go to for browsing.I really liked some little boxes that had book page details, there are also boxes decorated to look like books, and a personal favourite were book-shaped charms to mark your drinks glass.

An honourable mention goes to book-page confetti. I planned to use this as part of the wedding table decorations. I suppose this would be fairly easy to make yourself, but I genuinely don’t think I could bring myself to destroy books myself.  The ones I bought were from ForLoversWithLove on Etsy and I was really pleased with them. They also sell a lot of other really cute book related things. (I have to remind myself that I’m running out of storage space or we really would be in trouble).

The last place we were going to incorporate literature was in the service itself for the reading. I hadn’t completely finalised what I wanted because there’s so much choice! I’m taking some time to really think about it again – since I’ve got more time now. Shakespeare is very popular, I’ve had friends take extracts from Bronte novels, or Austen before. I love poetry too, particularly 20th Century poets – so there’s a lot to choose from. Unfortunately my specialism when I studied Literature at university veered towards the depressing (political novels, death poetry to name but two) so that’s not too much help! Love has inspired much of the best literature – I could listen to the words of talented writers all day. 

Although I’m calling my wedding ‘book themed’, I didn’t want it to become a gimmick. I opted to have a plain cake, not a book one, for example. Partly because I don’t really like icing, and I imagine a book themed naked cake would be pretty hard to come by, and partly because I’m relatively traditional at heart. There are some beautiful examples of book-cakes out there (especially if you’re a Harry Potter fan) but I wanted more of a light touch with everything. 

So, there’s a little bit of insight into how I was planning my big day. Now I’ve got an extra year or so, I’ll have to think of some more ideas! 

Let me know if you had any book themed elements at your wedding, or have any ideas for what else I could incorporate. I’m trying to distract myself from all the rubbish surrounding having to postpone our wedding but thinking of new ways to make it even better when it does come around.