
Crafting our weekly
#BookFaceFriday series this past year has been a blast! We’ve posted before about our bookface photos
highlighting the Nebraska 150 book list, and we’ve since expanded into our book club kit and University Press collections. Today, we’ll take you behind the scenes to show you how we construct a bookface photo.

We start by judging books by their covers, so to speak. (We know librarians are not supposed to do that, but we like to bend the rules sometimes. Shhhh, don’t tell!) Books with faces on them are obvious choices, of course, but sometimes we mix things up with a
body part or even
holiday decor. On occasion, we use the photo to promote an event or award, but for the most part, we just like to share fun covers in our collections.

After we have the book, we choose our
victim, er, model. Library Commission
staff are regularly featured, but we also like to snag
visitors when we can. Please don’t let that discourage you from visiting us.
Then comes the real “work” of posing the model and lining up the shot. Our photographer, Tessa Terry, goes to great lengths to get model and book aligned just so. I mainly just stand there with my arm out, trying not to let the book shake
too much.

Love this
#BookFace & reading? Want to check out all of our past
#BookFaceFriday photos? Follow us on the
Nebraska Library Commission’s Facebook page or subscribe to the
NLC blog!