Too many bookshelves

I'm preparing for a move, and have discovered I own 23 bookcases (not counting the built-ins). No two are the same - I have everything from out-of-the-box Ikea to vintage redwood to solid metal utility shelves, and all different shapes and sizes.

I would like to slowly move to less mismatched shelves, now that I will have a little more space and money, but it's been tougher than I thought to find new ones that I like! The nice thing though is that having so many I have have a pretty good idea of what works well. My favorite are a pair of very plain, solid maple, 9-in-deep bookshelves I saved from a church that was closing.

It's surprisingly hard to find any that match those, though - most shelves these days seem to be either 11+ inches deep, or 7.23 inches deep, which is either too deep or too narrow. And I am really tired of particleboard or plastic shelves that bend under the weight of actual books!

Does anyone have any recommendations for non-particleboard shelves that are well-suited for shelving actual books?

I’m in a similar phase as well; moving into my ultimate home and vowing to do it just so. No more chipboard! Except one entire wall of ikea Kallax in the basement; but that’s for other storage, not books.

Rather than wanting shelves that are uniformly sized though, I’m customizing for different collections and locations. I’m so blessed to have found a cabinetmaker who will build just what I want for a reasonable price. He uses 3/4” white finish plywood; which suits my 1950s house. He delivers the box cases and I install them, and that saves on the cost. So far, I’ve acquired over 40 linear feet for about $700. 11” deep for large books; 6” deep, tucked along a stairway railing, for old novels.
That is in addition to the various good wood cases I’ve acquired over the years which are scattered about the house.
I was just thinking of sharing my pictures to this group.

We've been using the IVAR tinker toy style system from IKEA. You buy the size and pieces you need and assemble as you go. Plus, if you get the unfinished, you can stain it to whatever shade you desire.

And they fit lots of weird room shapes. I have the roof coming down in the room, and can have a few shelves at one end and each section more until full room height is reached. New ones smell nice, but it wears off after a while.

I have the opposite problem. I moved from an apartment with lots of built-in bookcases to an apartment with none. I brought quite a few free-standing bookcases, but needed (and still need) more.

Having a nice wide hallway in the new place, I bought several three shelf Billy bookcases from Ikea. Although they are particleboard, they are quite sturdy and solid, and look good.

I’ve been using IVAR for the past thirty years: they aren’t particularly nice to look at, but they are incredibly robust, and adaptable when you move house. The 30cm shelves are probably a bit deeper than really necessary for books, though.

I definitely want different sizes, and some of my mismatched ones are neat, but I think I want a little more style cohesion than I currently have! Custom are a someday plan but I'm not in a forever home yet.

The IVAR look very good! They look similar to some old folding ones I still have from college. Too bad they're so wide - I'm working in small rooms where a few inches makes a difference, and also I find that the 11" standard IKEA width temps me too much to double-shelve without actually being quite wide enough to do it well. 19", 11" and 7.5" seem to be almost the only options for new off-the-shelf ones, though.

The Billy ones are nice and convenient but I've found the shelves start to warp under a load of books after only a few years, at least in this climate.

I actually have an old Sunset Bookshelves and Cabinets book with a pattern for easy, adaptable bookshelves that are directly based on Tinkertoys, using large dowels and disks cut from 4x4s, and I've always wanted to try making them, but I think they wouldn't be sturdy enough for actual books - they would be great for toys and games though, stained in Tinkertoy colors!

>4 MarthaJeanne:

Oooh, nice! Are those all Ivar?

Yes, and by using the different heights of 'ladders' I was able to use the whole wall for books.

We moved recently, and spent the summer of lockdown building the library. We bought a bunch of uniform shelves from Amazon, and installed them free-standing filling the room that had been the “great room”. Most of our old bookshelves (highly mismatched) went around the walls; many of them are paperback depth. The rest of them, mostly hardback depth, were scattered in other rooms. We finally have enough board-feet to have ALL of our books on a shelf!

This is a link to the ones we bought: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07S41MFL3/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_98VSCZYNTD47EKGV6K7Y
They come flat-packed, and you assemble them yourself. Since we bought a lot of them, we hired a handyman to do the job. They are particle board, but quite sturdy, and the shelves have a narrow board across the front edge which is solid wood, adding quite a bit of stiffness. The exterior depth is 10.3”; this fit most of my books okay. The shelves are adjustable. The only thing that is slightly problematic is that there are also vertical narrow boards at each side and on the interior partitions, forming a lip, which means that the books at each end slide behind them. We are gradually fixing this by putting in squares of foam-core to fill up that space. They look very nice; we have not had them long enough to say whether the shelves will sag, but since, with the interior partitions, each shelf is only about two feet long, I really don’t expect to see it.

I purchased my shelves at an office supply 'going out of business' type sale. Often when businesses close, they sell off the equipment at very low cost. You can get some really good quality furniture that way if you don't mind second hand. I think these were part of a law office.

Ikea Hemnes bookshelves are my favorite. The shelves themselves are solid pine, $150 new, have 6 shelves, adjustable heights with 4 shelves, 36" wide, hold 25-30 books on average a shelf, so 150-180 books total, and they've been making the espresso color for over 10+ years.

The problem with most bookcases is you can't find it again when you want another a few years down the road, the ones that are quality are way too much (a $900 bookcase that only holds 100 books means it's costing $9/book to shelve, which is more than I pay for most books I own), the ones that are economical in price are complete garbage (billy series), and a lot of them are made to be decorative and not meant to functionally hold a bunch of books (only 4 shelves or inconvenient shape).

Otherwise, if you like the look and you own a home that you're staying in for a while, then custom built-ins that go to the ceiling with a ladder (like marthajeanne's photo above) is probably the best way to go.

Our Billy and Ivar have gone through a few moves quite well. The Billy are actually two different colours, but seem to have aged in such a way that I can't tell them apart. There really aren't a lot of problems with sagging, but our climate is fairly dry. The bookcases my husband built (long gone) we had to turn the shelves over every few years. A lot of work, and no guarantees that all the books would still fit.

>13 nate48281:, in the 1980s and 1990s we bought book cases from generic "oak furniture" stores. Each store would have a corner with several cases of different heights and usually one or two standard widths. There was no choice on depth. We'd get what fit the space we had available and buy one or two extra shelves since our duodecimos only need about 9 inches and not the standard 12-inch pitch of most manufactured case shelves.

Flash forward to February 2021 and we have moved to a new house that is twice the size of what we had. We had space to add about a dozen more cases. But the selection we saw before was no longer available. We could look for used in a hit-and-miss fashion on CraigsList (U.S.) or Facebook Marketplace but decided to hunt for a cabinet maker who could replicate the style of what we had. We found a man who had made the kinds of cases we bought before as he was supplying them to many of those generic "oak furniture" stores. We gave him our ideal dimensions and he quoted us a price we could work with that compared favorably with anything of lesser quality we could buy from places like Ikea. We did substitute a different wood for oak for the cases themselves. The molding is still oak. The shelves are sturdy plywood to prevent sagging. We ordered extra shelves in case we had smaller books to place in them.

36-inches is about as wide as I would consider for solid pine shelves or plywood. The particle board or MDF is prone to sagging at that length if the books are old and/or heavy. You know best what kind of books you have.

We've been burned before by Ikea dropping or changing products. We have some garage shelving that started as Gorm and then the next we could buy was Hejne. It looks similar but is a different size so they are not really compatible with each other without modifications. As it was we did modifications to handle the 11-gallon storage totes we use there. Ikea has dropped small boxes (Kassette) that were ideal for holding certain books when we take them to book fairs or store them between events. Now I have to limp along with the boxes we have. They were designed for DVD cases but prove to be ideal for duodecimo juvenile series books.

We live in California, USA so earthquakes are a real possibility. We have mounted the taller 7-foot cases to the wall studs so they are very secure. The books may be ejected but it is a good starting point for safety.

I can round up photos if there is interest.

James

>15 Keeline: Yes, photos. Of course.