Ikea bookshelves for seforim?!

Sewsew_mom

Sat, Sep 24 2022, 9:35 pm

I have the hemnes for probably 10 years and didn't have any of those issues.
Mine are still holding up strong and looks good.
But I do agree with one poster that if u stick a book in the end and it's packed together tightly you can't slide it out. But totally a non issue for me.

nylon

Sat, Sep 24 2022, 11:08 pm

They came out with longer shelf nuts for the Hemnes, but the back is still flimsy.

I have been ok with Billy for seforim but if you fully load the shelves (I've got the 28cm/11" depth) with heavy seforim (e.g. my English Koren Talmud) they will sag with time. I have had Billys sag enough from being fully loaded with hardcovers (this has happened with tightly packed English book also) that a shelf became unusable and the shelf nuts bent and deformed the hole. So be careful with how heavy you load the shelves. If you leave some space and don't load them so tight, you'll be fine.

I checked IKEA and the 40cm/15" depth does not currently seem to be sold in the USA.

However I have not been able to find a better option that is not MUCH more expensive, so for us, it works better to keep buying these and have to replace the occasional case. My oldest shelves right now go back to 2009. I think I have replaced 2 of the original 6 I purchased (and added more, because I bought more books).

nicole81

Sat, Sep 24 2022, 11:22 pm

I bought the billies maybe 3 years ago and they're fine. You can sometimes get them for $99 so it's worth it if you need to replace.

But yeah you need to be careful. The heaviest books go on the bottom only. I forget if they have the built in middle support shelf, but if so, some heavy books can go on there. Best practice is to put the lightest to heaviest from top to bottom, which means entire sets sometimes span over multiple book cases and I have random shelves for siddurs, machzorim, kids books, extra benchers, random Jewish nonfiction, etc to fill up the taller shelves and keep them balanced.

seeker

Sun, Sep 25 2022, 1:49 am

On my Billy, the middle shelf is more supported, so yes heavier books go on bottom and middle. If you have more than one bookcase in a row you can still have your full sets of sefarim next to each other. I'm not sure how giant your sefarim are that a billy isn't deep enough. I have the standard regular one and it held a full size Shulchan Aruch very handily. (also a set of gemaras but I think those were not the largest size. They were pretty big but it wasn't a "Chosson Shas" - the shulchan aruchs were bigger than the gemaras.)

Extension means to make it higher. In my house, that's nearly ceiling height. A nice feature.