Shelving Choices for a Small Retail shop

I'd like to tell you about a couple choices I made when deciding on how to configure shelving for my bookshop. Some of you may be looking at making a similar choice in the near future, perhaps not for a bookshop per say but any small retail outfit. Ours was a one thousand foot used bookshop, Internet cafe; small by any standards. 

The problems we faced were mainly the cost of getting 'proper' bookstore shelving andkeeping an eclectic, warm and soothing atmosphere. We looking at the idea of building them ourselves but quickly rejected the idea once the realization of the time/cost/mess came to the forefront. Not to mention the disturbing feeling of potentially loosing a digit or two. As mentioned, we considered buying some high end shelving from a place like Fall Mountain but we really were bootstrapping this venture and the budget just wasn't there. So what did we settle on?

We had the shop for four years and not a day did I feel we settled. I was very pleased with our choice, in fact as I'm writing this in my home library I am surrounded by the shelves we bought. It was the black-brown veneer Billy bookcases from Ikea. It may sound odd that we chose a place like Ikea for eclectic warm shelving. Ikea is often associated with cold, impersonal furniture. Well these bookcases lent such a warm, ambient, soothing feel to the place barely a single person would come in without mentioning that it was one of the nicest looking used bookshops they had ever seen. Unfortunately our attempt to sell English books in a French market didn't pan out so well but I did learn a lot and dressing up a small retail space was one of them. An added bonus was that these bookcases come in a variety of different sizes as well as a few extras that all fit together nicely.

One of the last small challenges was displaying a wonderful collection of over-sized books. Some call them coffee table books but I find that a little condescending. These are wonderful travel books, nature books with some of the grandest photography you'd see anywhere. The problem was that they'd never sell while tucked in a traditional bookcase. It's the covers that sell these books and they needed to be displayed. We found slatwall shelving that came in the same finish as the Billy cases. We only needed a five by eight sheet with a few acrylic book holders. They did the job perfectly and was surprisingly inexpensive.So to summarize - if you are considering opening a small retail shop and are a little dismayed by the pricing of traditional shelving then consider a nice mix of slatwall displays with the Billy group of bookcases from Ikea. I should also add that we were also very pleased with the staying power of these. Only a dark wax pencil (wood filler) was needed from time to time to keep them looking like new and not one shelf ever warped.