Choosing Book-Themed Gifts for Librarians and Library Teachers

Looking for a gift for the librarian in your life? Whether it's for the holidays, a birthday, or a congratulations-on-becoming-a-librarian gift, it can be hard to think of gifts other than the obvious, like books. I've listed my ideas under 3 categories: gag gifts, book-themed gifts, and education-themed gifts.

If your librarian or library teacher has a sense of humor (or if you are trying to force one on him), perhaps you want to go with a "gag" gift, or a joke gift, to make him or her laugh (or roll his or her eyes). You could go with wearable joke gifts, as in silly t-shirts or hats or thongs. CafePress may be one of your best options for such a gift. They sell all sorts of clothing with just about any theme you could think of. Here is one example of a seller who specializes in library themes: TeaseCatalog. You can also get these kinds of designs on mugs, tote bags, and other media if you would rather not go the clothing route.

Other gag gifts may fall into the category of décor, such as silly figures, paper weights, signs, etc. One of the most popular of such products is the librarian action figure.

Of course, it can generally be assumed that librarians or library teachers are also book lovers. They have chosen to surround themselves daily with books and people searching for books, so it is generally safe to get a librarian a book-themed gift.

You could go for books about libraries, librarians, or the library science profession. This may be particularly apt for newbie librarians or even people thinking about entering library science. Or perhaps for a librarian who can't get enough info about her profession or loves it so much that even after work she wants to continue reading about it.

If you know what type of books she likes, perhaps a genre, author, or a series, you could buy a nice boxed set or a rare edition.

You could also choose book accessories and other book paraphernalia, such as bookmarks, bookends, shelves, organizers, etc. A bookstore might be a good place to look, if you hadn't come up with that already.

Another possibility is to choose book-themed gag gifts, clothing and totes with book-themed designs, mugs, decorations, etc.

If the person you are getting a gift for is a library teacher rather than a librarian, you can go for an education theme, which of course opens a variety of options. If your library teacher is new to the profession, you can get her practical gifts that she might need, such as posters, dry-erase markers, stickers, classroom decorations, puppets, etc.

If your gift-receiver is not a new teacher, you can go for teacher-themed decorations, posters, clothing, lanyards, tote bags (which are also practical for teachers), jewelry for women, ties for men, etc. "Teacher-themed" can be up for interpretation. You can go for he traditional apple, chalkboard, books, school house, etc. or anything that you think this person in particular might like.