I hate this because I love books. When I think of all the books I’ve gotten for less than $.50…the wonderfully trashy “autobiography” of Marilyn Monroe, the biography of Arthur Conan Doyle written by John Dickson Carr, totally forgotten stories by James Cain, all the classic and the trashy I’ve picked up at 3 for a dollar sales…I just wish I had the opportunity to rummage through that dumpster.
Gee, it’s too bad he didn’t live around here. We have a group of volunteers, VNSA*, and once a year they hold a used book sale for one weekend, giving the proceeds to three different good causes. They haul some 600,000 books to the county fairground all sorted by subject. I don’t know where they keep 'em the other 363 days, but there are about twenty collection stations where they take them in. 4,000 books would be a barely noticeable blip to them, and they probably would have even come out to pick them up. Sigh.
The sale is a bookworm’s paradise. I’ve staggered out with more books than I can carry for about twenty bucks.
*The site is acting weird. Click on the top links to actually find out anything.
Yahoo! Maps tells me that the location is 2,127 miles away from my home. Thinking about those 600,000, it somehow doesn’t seem all that far . . .
We do get lots of out-of-state buyers. Shipping can be a problem unless you drive out.
Oh, I know, I know. I love browsing used book stores or the library, picking up anything that strikes me as interesting. It’s a pity that these books couldn’t have been given to someone, somewhere, who could make sure that they’d reach eager readers.
Hallgirl1 works for a major chain pharmacy store. One evening while she was at work she noticed, in the trash, several dozen books–their covers torn off. Gathering up as many as she could handle, she brought them home where I read them (coverless), then passed them along to anyone who was interested in reading them.
It seems that the store needed the shelf space for the next wave of incoming best sellers, and had torn off the covers to be refunded from the publishers. The rest of the book? Well, that was simply tossed in the trash.
It makes me want to weep.
Around here, books like that could be bought in bulk by interior designers. They “stage” houses for sale to make them look lived in without actually being lived in, which consist of putting in furniture and such, but also stocking book shelves.
When we were looking at houses, it was always amusing to look at the obscure titles that were in the bookshelves that likely wouldn’t ever be read, but were simply on display as books.
They’re contractually obligated to destroy them, actually. Many such books will bear a message from the author or the publisher stating that if you buy a book that’s been stripped of its cover, it’s “stolen” from the publisher.
My daughter works for a used/overstock book store, and they sell some books “by the yard” for just such a purpose. RD collections, old encyclopedias, that sort of thing. Of course they’ll also sell these books singly, if someone wants to buy them.
Some people have empty bookshelves and wish to have them filled for interior decorating purposes. My problem isn’t empty book shelves, it’s that I don’t have enough.
When I moved into a new home and had to get rid of about half my library, I almost had to throw away more than 500 books. Ny employer, a hospital, had a small “library” for patients – it was about 30 paperbacks on a rolling cart, and I thought this would be great for them. I had two sets of books all boxed up-- the keepers and the rest. The woman with the book cart wanted me to go through my books and pick out some very specific topics that she was willing to take. When I said nope, you can have it all and keep what you want, she chose to take nothing. Really, it was too bad. I had everything form colege texts to popular thrillers to boatloads of histories. I think the hospital turned down a really beneficial gift.
Fortunately, I found another book nut who would take them, and I got thanks for the next couple of years as she and her husband read through them.
That is a shame. twickster had the great idea of bringing one’s extra books to Gettysdope for a swap table, and it’s been very well received-I picked up a few gems this past fest, and took the remainder to a local second-hand book store.
Libraries are afraid of mold, too. Mold abatement can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars - and sometimes you have to toss whole collections because mold abatement is too expensive or not possible.
Besides, there is no such thing as a free book - processing a “free” book for the catalog and the shelf costs staff hours and supplies. And then there’s the staff time required to sort through the books and decide which are appropriate for the collection.
I agree that some libraries may have been able to sell them in their booksales or give them away, provided they had the staff time or appropriate volunteers to do the work.
Finding homes for books is not as simple as it might appear on the surface.
I’m going through a faintly similar personal dilemma right now.
My father died unexpectedly recently (October 12), leaving behind many thousands of books. I’ve scooped up several hundred things I’ll be keeping but there’s so much more: obscure self-published literary magazines from various black writers’ collectives, magazines like NEGRO DIGEST and books by the Charles H. Kerr & Company; various books about Malcolm X, Booker T Washington and numerous abolitionists; the essays, speeches and fictional work of W.E.B. DuBois, books on socialism and communism, various aspects of American labor movements, volumes on racism, black nationalism, Indian and Asian history, feminists titles, books on indigeous societies, what may be a near complete run of Black Panther newspapers, political posters, various pamphlets and handbills from the sixties and seventies, political souvenirs from the eighties and nineties, 21st century autographed books by local Georgia authors Pop encouraged, and other odds and ends of ephemra that is a wealth of information. Heck, Pop even picked up stuff from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History 91st annual meeting earlier this month just before he died.
We’re talking about a potential loss of around 20,000 individual works, including daddy’s physics library (quantum physics was a lifelong interest), his jazz, blues and funk LPs, or his African art collection, (Okay, my aunt and my sister and I already split the artwork) and souivenirs from his trip to Uganda 12 years ago.
Luckily there are specialized libraries that appear to be interested in preserving Pop’s library, and thank God Atlanta has so many historically black colleges and universities me and my sisters feel comfortable donating his works to. I must stress that it is the wish of myself and the other children that we will gladly forgo any personal profit from the books so long as they find a good home in a collection named for Pop. We’re sorting offers. But this is still not an easy process: books still have to be reboxed and made ready for shipping, the books still have to be made ready for potential long term storage until they can be properly indexed, I still have to organize the physical labor to move these things out his house this week.
responsibly donating books of this magnitude is not easy.
That makes me sick. Waste food, waste water, waste money but leave our ideas alone.
The library from the University of Miami would give away/sell very cheaply its old books periodically (mostly paperback novels, some non-fiction that wasn’t old enough to be important again). So I have several books that are stamped Discarded but I promise I’ve read them 
I also got a vynil of sardanas for Mom, sardanas being a kind of dance from her part of Spain which I would never have expected to run into in Miami
OTOH, the North Miami branch of the public library’s Fantasy and Science Fiction section consisted of a single book until I came back to Spain and showed at their door with several bags of books… it’s a pity there aren’t better mechanisms for the riches to get spread, know what I mean?
I guess the store figures that pitching them in the dumpster is a much safer mode of “destroying” them than setting bonfire in the parking lot in the city of Philadelphia… :rolleyes:
And, just the clarify, there’s not exchanging of any funds where these books are concerned.
Mr2U got himself in a bit of trouble with the law (it was driving stuff) and is now doing community service at the Library a couple towns away. One of his duties is to destroy books. Rip off the covers, throw them in one bin and the rest goes into recycling. Although he doesn’t read, he knows what a nut I am and brings me van loads home - we have floor to ceiling bookshelves in our third bedroom now. We’ve got everything from a 1931 Rand McNally atlas to cookbooks, to medical books, to you name it. We’ve got records (those vinyl things that used to be all the rage 
) like you wouldn’t believe too - everything from Traffic (John Barleycorn Must Die) to the score from Fiddler on the Roof. People are constantly dropping stuff off at the library that the library cant’ use/doesn’t have room for - and if my husband didn’t grab a lot of the stuff it would sit in a landfill. It’s too bad we don’t have more room - I’d “rescue” more stuff!