Ikea Celebrates 40 Years of Billy By Going Full Yellow

Look at the stars, look how they shine for you€¦

In a move that would make Coldplay (and Portland rapper and noted yellow fan Aminé!) proud, Ikea is toasting to the 40th anniversary of its Billy bookcase by releasing the best-selling item in a bright yellow hue.The delightfully sunny shelf retails for $85 and is only available in the Billy bookcase’s largest, 202-centimetre-high size. For the occasion, Ikea has also released a series of high-gloss Bottna book-ends and display units (from $5)—each coated in a complementary shade of red, blue or green—that may be used in conjunction with Billy’s shelves to better show off your treasures and trinkets.“Billy usually tries to blend in,” note the head honchos at Ikea, “but from February 2019, the new yellow Billy makes your valued items really ‘pop.’ ”Designed by one of Ikea’s first employees, Gillis Lundgren—a man who very selflessly named the object after his colleague, Billy Liljedahl, for reasons we can only assume are related to the power of alliteration in marketing—the Billy bookcase is one of the Swedish furniture giant’s most ubiquitous offerings and an essential part of any twenty-something’s first-apartment starter kit.In fact, Ikea estimates it sells one Billy bookcase every (!) five (!!) seconds (!!!), which means it’s sold a lot of bookcases since Billy’s birth in 1979, if our math is correct. The company has even begun accepting gently used Billys and other Ikea items for discounted re-sale in an effort to green up its operations.Check out some of Ikea’s 40th-anniversary Billy line-up below, and shop the collection in-store and online come February.