IKEA Billy
line of bookcases
Billy (stylised as BILLY) is a bookcase sold by the Swedish furniture company IKEA. It was developed in 1979 by the Swedish designer Gillis Lundgren, and IKEA has sold over 140 million units of the bookcases worldwide. Its popularity and global spread have led to its use as a price index.
Construction
The shelf parts are made of melamine-coated or veneered particle board. The edges are covered with plastic strips. The shelves are placed on brass flanged pins, which are themselves inserted into holes with a vertical distance of 32 mm. The shelves are available in several colours and finishes, with widths of 40 or 80 cm. The bookshelves can be coupled, and optional doors can be added. The bookcases are sold in flat-pack form, to be assembled by the purchaser.
Billy bookcases are manufactured in factories in Sweden, Germany, Slovakia, and China. It is manufactured for IKEA by Gyllensvaans Möbler at their factory in Kattilstorp, Sweden.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q862980. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1979.
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This entry incorporates text from “IKEA Billy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.