Cassie & Hugh's Book Nerd Open Bar Dance Party Wedding

The offbeat bride: Cassie, Future Librarian

Her offbeat partner: Hugh, Future Philosopher

Location & date of wedding: The Clarke Estate in Santa Fe Springs, CA on July 20th, 2008

What made our wedding offbeat:Our philosophy was to throw a really great party where we just happened to get married. We also had a super tight budget, but staying true to ourselves and working with a tight budget magically went hand in hand.

We're both former book store employees and huge readers so we raided our book collection to come up with the bulk of the books that were recycled into centerpieces. I found a vintage dress for $60 then had it remade exactly (since the original fabric had yellowed) for very very little money.

We enlisted our amazing friends for the following duties: designing our invites (and save the date bookmarks!), taking photos, making our amazing wedding cupcakes, hair, make-up, making buttons with "7.20" and "H x C" (our initials and a nod to hardcore all in one!) that we gave out as wedding favors.

One of our friends even covered My Bloody Valentine's "Sometimes" for our first dance. Also, we walked down the aisle to the Spiritualized song "Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space" and threw in some Hegel into our wedding vows.

Our biggest challenge: We both have fairly traditional families so certain challenges came up here and there which had to be dealt with. One example is that we knew we wanted a really really short ceremony.

Hugh's sister married us (which was really special) but since she is a pastor and this is something she does professionally we had to compromise on a few things (which wouldn't have been an issue if, say, a friend married us and we could tell them exactly what to say). All in all though, she was very respectful of our input and we still had an awesomely short ceremony.

Also, staying sane when my mom kept inviting more and more relatives (we wanted to keep things as small as possible) and also when she insisted we needed things like ushers to escort people to their seats (we didn't).

My favorite moment: Dancing around, sipping champagne with my soon-to-be husband and close friends in our adjoining dressing rooms minutes before the ceremony started.

My offbeat advice: Focus on what matters to you (and your partner), the little things that you think you will remember most when you look back on your wedding day: whether it's music or photography or food. Don't waste time on the things you don't care about (for me it was flowers) and don't do things because people tell you that you HAVE to. You don't have to do anything, it's your wedding! Keep reminding yourself of this constantly.

Enough talk — show me the wedding porn: Click the photo below for more nerdtastic photos of Cassie & Hugh's library-themed wedding!