The Perfect Guest Book for Your Wedding

In addition to wedding photos and videos, guest books are among the most important keepsakes from your wedding. That’s why it’s important to choose the right guest book, and there are countless different styles and options to choose from. Here, we’ll show you how to find the right guest book for your wedding.

Types of Guest Books: Style, Format, and Freedom

Guest books mainly come in two forms: those with pre-formatted pages, which are somewhat reminiscent of the friendship books from our school days, and completely blank books that give your guests maximum freedom to be creative.

For several years now, unique “guest books” have also been all the rage. We put “guest books” in quotation marks because, strictly speaking, they aren’t actually books. Instead of a book, guests sign a wine barrel, a canvas, a guitar, or other objects. It’s a nice idea in principle—you should just make sure it’s something you actually want to display in your home. It would be a shame if your keepsake ended up languishing in the dark in the basement.

Which guest book is the right one?

If you're still not sure which type of guest book is right for your wedding, we've listed some pros and cons of the different guest book styles here.

Preformatted Guest Books

These wedding guest books make it very easy for your loved ones to leave you a little memento. They usually contain playful trivia questions where guests have to guess who takes longer to get ready in the morning or whether the bride or groom is more adventurous. This can be a lot of fun, but it also limits your guests’ creativity and individuality.

Empty Guest Books

Wedding guest books with blank pages give each guest a canvas on which to express themselves. They can use the pages to write down their wishes for you, reminisce about shared experiences, leave you little works of art, or whatever else comes to mind. And that’s actually the biggest drawback of these guest books: the guests have to come up with something themselves.

But you can also help overcome this hurdle by simply writing down a few questions or small tasks yourselves. It also helps if, in addition to pens, you provide other creative supplies like colored pencils, stickers, and highlighters. Photos can also be glued in—provided that the snapshots taken with your photo booth can be printed or you pass around instant cameras.

Unique Guest Books

As mentioned above, various alternative items are increasingly being used as guest books. This is a particularly nice idea when the item represents one of the couple’s hobbies—for example, a guitar for a couple of musicians, or a globe or world map for travel enthusiasts. The downside of these alternative guest books is, on the one hand, that not all of them will fit on a bookshelf or even in the home, and on the other hand, that guests are usually only able to write their names in them.

If you're looking for ideas for unique guest books, you'll find them here: Ideas for an extraordinary wedding guest book

The Design of the Guest Book

As soon as you start searching online for guest books for your wedding, Amazon, Etsy, and other sites will overwhelm you with countless styles and designs. Of course, it’s important that the guest book reflects who you are and fits your wedding. Our tip: Talk to your wedding stationery designer. They can usually create a guest book that matches your wedding invitations, place cards, and other elements, so that in the end, everything goes together just as well as you do.