The Grand Athenaeum
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.tagortags– show books with one or more book tag slugs.columns– choose1,2,3, or4columns.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 toleft,center, orright.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.