Curate your literary universe.

For authors, readers, collectors, and unapologetic book nerds.

The Grand Athenaeum helps you create beautiful book collections on WordPress. Use it to showcase your own books, organize series and reading orders, build curated recommendation pages, or share favorite reads with clean, reader-friendly book cards.

The plugin creates a dedicated Books area in WordPress, with fields for covers, subtitles, series labels, display order, prices, retailer links, blurbs, tags, tropes, and excerpts. Books can be grouped into series, tagged for discovery, and displayed on pages with a simple shortcode.

Use The Grand Athenaeum for author libraries, book blogs, fan-curated reading tables, affiliate-friendly recommendation shelves, series reading orders, trope lists, and themed book collections.

What you can build

Author book catalogs
Series and reading-order pages
Favorite-book shelves
Book recommendation grids
Trope-based reading lists
Reader resource pages
Affiliate-friendly book tables
Simple book archive pages

Features

Dedicated Book custom post type
Series taxonomy for organizing books by series or collection
Book Tags taxonomy for genres, tropes, formats, moods, and reader-facing labels
Responsive book grids with 1, 2, 3, or 4 columns
Single-book page rendering
Cover image field with reader-facing cover preview
Subtitle / tagline field
Flexible Series Label field for values such as Book 1, Book 2.5, Volume IV, Volume XI, Tome 3, or Scroll 5
Display Order field for arranging books and reading orders
Price display with optional Hide Price toggle
Preorder status and release date field
Automatic launch-day New Release behavior for dated preorders
Manual New Release badge
Retailer, subscription, library, social, and custom links
Drag-and-drop link ordering
Built-in SVG icon set for common book, retailer, library, subscription, and social platforms
Synopsis / Blurb accordion content
Tags / Tropes accordion content
Look Inside label and excerpt popup
Settings for accent color, cover background, card background, text color, muted text, font family, optional Google Fonts URL, and default grid columns
Translation-ready strings
GPL-compatible bundled code

Shortcode

Use this shortcode to display books:

[grand_athenaeum_grid]

Optional attributes:

series – show books from one series slug.
tag or tags – show books with one or more book tag slugs.
columns – choose 1, 2, 3, or 4 columns.
book_id – show one specific book.
title – show a heading above the grid.
posts_per_page – limit the number of books shown.
heading_align – set heading alignment to left, center, or right.
heading_color – set a heading color with a hex value.
include_unordered – include books without a display order when filtering.

Examples:

[grand_athenaeum_grid]

[grand_athenaeum_grid series="my-series" columns="3"]

[grand_athenaeum_grid tag="found-family" columns="4"]

[grand_athenaeum_grid book_id="123" columns="1"]

Shortcode Compatibility

The current shortcodes use the grand_athenaeum_ prefix. Legacy bookshelf_* shortcodes remain supported for backward compatibility with existing sites.