October: It's A Mystery Display

October is National Mystery Month! There are several great ideas for mystery displays on Pinterest, Google and personal blogs, it's hard to pick just one! Our Library Advisory Board students had asked for more displays like Blind Date With A Book. They liked choosing books based on other facts besides the cover. I incorporated this idea into our new display, It's A Mystery.

Did you know that there are more than 8 types of sub-genres for mysteries? I did not. For this display I chose to focus on only five sub-genres: Historical, Crime, Thriller, Detective and Romantic. We Genrefied our fiction collection last year and it allowed me to pull reports on sub-genres very easily. I made five resource lists of books and printed them out. I made an excel spreadsheet of all the barcodes for each book and numbered them 1-27. A volunteer pulled the books and one of our Student Library Assistants put the books into brown paper bags, wrote the number I had given on the back of the bag, and kept them sorted into their five piles. This process took much less time than wrapping each book in paper like we did for the Blind Date With A Book display.

I created five different "logos" to represent each sub-genre. These were printed and cut out as decorations for the display.

Each "Logo" had a symbol to represent the sub-genre, I printed out these symbols and our student assistant glued the corresponding symbol to the correct pile of books. This was the only clue students got to know what book was in the bag.

I made a signout sheet so students could write the number on the back of the bag and their name to checkout the book. This way they remained completely in the dark about what book was inside the bag until after it was checked out.

I made signage explaining how to check out the book and put it on the display.

For decorations I used the "logos" I had made, along with text saying "It's A Mystery." I used question marks and the classic Who? What? Where? How? Why? When? and cut them out and put them around the display.

Overall it was not nearly as popular as the Blind Date With A Book display. I think it was too difficult for students to know what was in the bag and they shied away from checking them out. If I did it again I think I would include something like "If you like....." to the front of each bag and a better clue as to what is inside.  I have an idea for a Scrabble display using books that are wrapped, we will see if that is more popular.