How To Make And Use A Lectern In Minecraft

Lecterns naturally generate in village libraries. They can also be expected to generate as part of the new ancient cities in the upcoming update of Minecraft.

Lecterns allow unemployed villagers to switch to the librarian profession. Apart from that, these blocks also can be used in other different ways.

This article contains everything you need to know about how to make and use lecterns in Minecraft. Let’s get to it!

How To Make A Lectern In Minecraft

First of all, you need to gather the needed materials to craft a lectern. This includes 1 bookshelf and 4 wooden slabs from any type of wood.

Place the bookshelf block in the middle slot of the crafting table. Then, the 3 wooden slabs go into the top 3 slots and the last one goes into the middle bottom slot.

Basically, a “T” pattern is formed with a bookshelf in the middle. The crafting recipe can also be found below:

Fortunately, the materials needed for crafting this block are easy to find. Trees can be found anywhere to get the wooden planks to craft the slabs and bookshelf.

Leather and paper are needed to craft the books for making the bookshelf. Leather can be easily obtained by killing cows and paper is crafted from sugarcane which can be found near rivers.

How To Use A Lectern In Minecraft

As stated earlier, the lectern can be used in different other ways aside from changing the villager profession. Here are the following uses of the specialty block in the order of most useful to least:

Villager Profession

One of the most helpful uses of the lectern specialty block is to change a villager’s profession from unemployed to a librarian. This change will allow the villager to offer up more trading options.

Librarian villagers offer items such as lanterns, bookshelves, glass, clocks, compasses, name tags, and the most valuable ones, enchanted books. These items can be bought from them using emeralds.

Trading with librarian villagers is one of the easiest ways to get the best enchantments for your gear in Minecraft.

The lectern block can be used by any villagers to change into the librarian profession except for the Nitwit villagers which, by design, cannot take on a profession.

Redstone Signaling

Aside from changing villager professions, the lectern block can also be used to provide redstone signals for various builds.

The strength of the redstone signal that the lectern can emit depends on the pages that the book placed on the lectern has.

The full technicalities regarding the use of lecterns in providing redstone signals can be seen on the Minecraft Wiki.

Building Decoration

As expected, the lectern can hold books. A single book and quill or a written and signed book can be placed on top of the lectern.

This allows other players to read whatever content the book has. As stated earlier, the content of the book affects the redstone signal that the block provides. The longer the book, the stronger the signal.

Quick Trivia: A maximum of 100 pages can be written using the book and quill in Minecraft. With this, you can definitely tell a lot of information to other players when you are playing in a server.

Enchanted books or normal books, however, cannot be placed on the lectern.

The placed book can be retrieved by placing a replacement book on the lectern or destroying the lectern block itself.

Making Music

Similar to other blocks in the game, placing a note block on top of another block changes the sound produced by the note block. When a note block is placed on top of the lectern, the resulting sound produced when you hit the note block is a low drum-like or bass sound.

Burn As Fuel

Lastly, when desperate times come, each lectern block can be used to smelt 1.5 items when placed as a fuel source in a furnace according to the Minecraft Wiki.

Conclusion

That’s it! These are all the possible uses of the lectern block and how to make them in Minecraft.

By following this guide, you can now make and use lectern blocks in your own build or for trading books with librarians! Good luck and have fun!