The Retro Blog

Quick, what’s the most published work in the world? Hint: there are three times as many of these in existence than the bible. Hint 2: did you not read the title of this post? I totally gave it away.

That’s right, since it was first published in 1951 over 165 million copies of the Ikea catalogue have made it into circulation. Here’s a photo of all the covers. One lucky blogger found the 1965 catalogue at her parent’s house. Looks like they had some pretty good stuff.

The company was started in 1948 and built its first store in Sweden in 1958. It didn’t make it to the US until 1985. While the product names could just be Scandinavian sounding gibberish to a lot of us, there’s actually an interesting method for selecting product names:

• Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, rattan furniture, bookshelves, media storage, doorknobs: Swedish place names
• Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian place names
• Dining tables and chairs: Finnish place names
• Bookcase ranges: Occupations
• Bathroom articles: Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays
• Kitchens: grammatical terms
• Chairs, desks: men’s names
• Materials, curtains: women’s names
• Garden furniture: Swedish islands
• Carpets: Danish place names
• Lighting: terms from music, chemistry, meteorology, measures, weights, seasons, months, days, boats, nautical terms
• Bedlinen, bed covers, pillows/cushions: flowers, plants, precious stones
• Children’s items: mammals, birds, adjectives
• Curtain accessories: mathematical and geometrical terms
• Kitchen utensils: foreign words, spices, herbs, fish, mushrooms, fruits or berries, functional descriptions
• Boxes, wall decoration, pictures and frames, clocks: colloquial expressions, also Swedish place names