How to Make A Chiseled Bookshelf In Minecraft 1.20

Before the 1.20 update announcement, all bookshelves in Minecraft are pure decoration. Players cannot store books in them, and their only purpose is to power up the enchanting table. With the new update, you will be able to use bookshelves the way they are supposed to - for storing books.

In this article, Gurugamer is going to showcase how to make a chiseled bookshelf in Minecraft 1.20 in order to bring your home library to life. At the moment, this feature is only available in the Minecraft 1.20 beta and the 22w42a Snapshot.

1. How to create a Chiseled Bookshelf

Each chiseled bookshelf requires 6 wood planks and 3 wood slabs. This is a much easier requirement than the normal bookshelf which requires books instead of planks.

You can use any type of wood to craft it, and the planks don't even need to be of the same type. However, the appearance of the shelf would stay the same.

Below is the crafting recipe. Just fill the middle row of the crafting area with wood slabs then place wood planks in all the remaining slots.

Crafting Recipe Of Chiseled Bookshelf — Crafting Recipe

2. How to store books on Minecraft chiseled bookshelf

After placing the Chiseled bookshelf, just equip the book item you want to store (books, books and quills, written books, and enchanted books), then right-click or use the secondary action key on the chiseled bookshelf. The chiseled bookshelf will get filled each time you place an item. Each shelf can store up to 6 books.

Just right-click or use the secondary action key on them to pick the books back (as long as you don't already have a book on your hand. The chiseled bookshelf follows a stack order so the item you place last will get removed first.

Other uses

Chiseled bookshelves can be placed under note blocks to produce a "bass" sound.
Chiseled bookshelves can be used as fuel in furnaces to smelt 1.5 items.
A redstone comparator sends a signal (1–6) indicating the last slot interacted with, or no signal if no slot has been used yet. Note this is not the same as the number of books in the shelf, as removing a book will record the corresponding slot as last interacted with.

Right now these are the only purpose of these blocks. It is unclear if these shelves can replace the role of the normal bookshelf in powering the enchanting table.

3. How should Mojang improve the Chiseled bookshelf?

There should be Chiseled bookshelves (and classic bookshelves) of every wood type in the game. This would fit with the update, as the different variants would help to increase the levels of storytelling, and it would be a nice quality of life feature.

Minecraft 120 Chiseled Bookshelf — we need a way to differentiate the books on the shelf.

With the chiseled bookshelf, we need a way to differentiate the books on the shelf. When we can color them we will have the ability to tell them apart so we do not spend hours taking books off shelves trying to figure out which is which. Leather is a material that is able to be dyed so this makes sense because Minecraft books are all made of leather.