Spine Label: Fill & Download for Free

When I was seven years old we moved into a house my dad purchased. It was mostly all cleaned out but there was cardboard box in the corner of the garage.In the cardboard box there turned out to be 4 leatherbound folio volumes of more than a thousand pages each. The spines labeled them “The History of the World, volumes I, II, III, IV”The History of the World. Imagine that.My father was about to throw them in the trash. I asked if I could keep them.He said OK but I would have to keep them in my bedroom. They were so big and heavy and I was so small that I had to make four trips, one for each volume, to get them up to my bedroom.I started to page through them over the weeks and months. Mostly dense Victorian text in three column format but also littered with gorgeous and gory line drawing engravings. Everything from the Sphinx and the Rape of the Sabine Women to Bismarck and Wilhelm riding to victory after the Battle of Sedan.Within a few months, still aged seven, I started reading from the beginning. Oh my how difficult and dry. Started with the geography of Egypt and just got drier. But I kept it up. The History of the World, after all. In between reading I kept my spirits up going over and over the engravings.By about age nine I was halfway through volume II and recognized that I didn’t remember a thing I’d read. So I went back to the beginning, vowing to go slow and pay attention. I finished by about age thirteen.Those volumes taught me to read, they taught me to think, and they certainly taught me world history. The biggest single contributor to my mind and my education.At sixteen I was reading Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel, an autobiographical novel. He describes finding a leatherbound folio set of four thousand-page volumes under the stairs of his childhood home. He lovingly described the same engravings that were burned into my mind. I recognized each one he described, could turn to the page it was on.They were the foundation of his education, as they were of mine. He started at age three, not seven, a measure of the gap between his intelligence and mine.What a powerful moment of identification with a piece of literature!There is a Thomas Wolfe museum in Asheville, North Carolina that contains a replica of his childhood bedroom. On the bookshelf they managed to preserve three of those four precious volumes. They were exactly the same edition as my childhood educators.

I love organizing books. If I had my own library and a free afternoon, I would organize the shelves until they looked beautiful and neat.I personally like to split my library into fiction and non-fiction.I organize the fiction alphabetically by author’s last name, like it would be in a library. You just look at the spine or the title page and figure out the author’s last name. If an author wrote more than one book, I organize them alphabetically by title.I organize the non-fiction by subject. I have all of my Spanish books together, history, geography and maps, mythology, comics, and science. In generally that order.If you want to organize your books only by the spine, it might be difficult to find the book you’re looking for. It can look pretty though.You could organize by their color, putting them in rainbow order.I personally like the eclectic look of the different colors together.You could also organize by size, with large books on the end and small ones in the middle. Or going from large to small.You could do a mix of organization be color and size.You do you, and happy reading!

The easiest way to create a spine label for a three-ring binder is to create a PowerPoint text box the size you want your spine. Center your text within the text box. Make sure you put borders on the text box so you can easily see where to cut. I like to use light blue borders so the borders are not as visible when I cut the spine. Measure the clear-plastic pocket, and make your spine a little thinner so it will slide in easily.You could also make a table in Word with the number of columns equal to the number of spines you want to make. Center your text within the column(s) both vertically and horizontally.Print on cardstock. Done!