Getting Your Hands on Vintage Books in St. Johns

It's true!

One of my favorite tasks as a designer is to work with Néna at St. Johns Booksellers to come up with ideas and window designs to promote her wonderful bookstore and the books she sells. For January, Néna wanted to showcase some of her outstanding vintage books. This is what I came up with:

Decembers's window was a much-welcome explosion of lights, color and glitter for the holidays, so I wanted to do something very clean and simple for January to let the amazing vintage books shine. Hence, the idea of books being pieces of history you can hold in your hands. To carry the idea, I created a number of hand outlines in various fun and vintage-style papers, to place in the books and around the window.

The results were exactly what I wanted! I love the moment when I take a step back, about halfway through the process of setting up the window, and realize that my idea is going to work exactly the way I'd hoped. Especially when times are tight and the design budget is limited.

I've had so many compliments on the poster I created for the window, I decided to offer it for sale in my Etsy store.

Néna has some AMAZING vintage books, including a gorgeously tooled set of Oscar Wildes, and an almost unbelievably cool self-published and AUTOGRAPHED Anais Nin! She also has a Victorian-era Imperial folio on Pompeii which is just incredible. I am rapidly running out of superlatives!

Check out more about St. Johns Booksellers over on Facebook.