[QUOTE=Justin_Bailey]
Absolutely. We’ll look through them and some will be added, some will be donated to other groups, some will be sold in our book sale and your partially complete set of World Books from 1984 will be thrown away.
[/QUOTE]
And please do not be offended when we do this. The incomplete World Books 1984 is not at all an exaggeration; these are some actual donations we’ve received at various places I’ve worked:
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About 5 volumes (of dozens) of the Code of Florida [without the rest of the Code of Florida it’s completely worthless; with the rest of it it’s 99% worthless to somebody studying law in Alabama who can already access the Code of Florida a whole lot easier through the Internet and through various databases). This and a lot of other useless shit was donated by a woman who called us day after day after day and sometimes many times during the day asking us to send somebody to pick it up and then getting hostile we weren’t burning to take such a wonderful gift, and I was the one who finally got sent to pick it up and sure enough it was shit as we’d suspected it was. Got tossed.
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Roughly a bazillion “How to make a fortune in _____” guides, most of them with pictures of guys in leisure suits on the front and titles in fonts that don’t exist anymore
-Roughly a bazillion “Lose 30 pounds a day on the _____ diet” books
-National Bugging Geographics Out the Asssssssssss- I’ll grant it’s a magazine I love to read but a) has anybody ever thrown an issue away? b) we really don’t have the space to house a donation to August 1979 through April 1994 of it
-1995 Road Map of Kentucky [actual item]
-a 3 volume leather bound gazetteer of South Korea- again, actual item, and for a research library this may have some value; to a tiny technical school where nobody speaks Korean and they don’t even teach a course in geography, it has, roughly, absolutely none
- Romance novels (again, to a large and public library, the hardback ones may have some value, but to a small college library, NO.
We also receive boxes of straight-off-the-presses L. Ron Hubbard books from Scientology HQ about once every couple of years. They’re all mint condition. I’m sure they don’t just send these to our library so I’m guessing they send them to at least hundreds and probably thousands which makes me wonder how much they spend and how many libraries add them to the collection.
We have a book giveaway about twice a year (we’re so small and students only that we don’t even try to sell them) and usually succeed in giving away about 3/4 of the stuff donated. Not one of the L. Ron books has ever found a new home.
Most people are perfectly okay and don’t care if we give their stuff away or toss it in the garbage, but you do get people who are very upset it wasn’t added to the collection. (I have a horror story about a professor who donated his “Third World Library” to a college I worked at in Georgia but I’ll spare you other than to say most of it was major league CRAP and his tax deduction estimate made it look like the Donation of Constantine.)
I’ve also worked at some places that had some incredible stuff donated but we were the wrong library for it. These are things that have been donated to libraries where I’ve worked that were far from worthless, BUT were given to the wrong library:
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The personal papers and many personal effects of “Miz” Lillian Carter (Jimmy’s mother); great stuff some of it, but the university and library simply did not have the money to archive it but neither have they ever been able to bring themselves to give it away, so it sits in inventoried archival boxes in a storage room where it’ll likely never be used.
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An incredible record collection compiled over more than 50 years by an old blues singer turned music teacher that included albums from the dawn of recording technology and I am sure many only known copies- we’re talking thousands of disks- but again, the school simply had no money to catalog and accession and house them, but, also again, wouldn’t let them go (the monkey with his hand in the gourd type thing) so they’re in climate controlled purgatory
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The many papers of a man who as a teenager had been a guard at Andersonville and who later become a doctor and a legislator- not famous but he left detailed notes on all kinds of things including an unpublished handwritten memoir of his time at Andersonville, handwritten instructions on how to perform various procedures (including abortion) on livestock (it wasn’t uncommon for doctors to service both humans and livestock), and materials from various state legislative hearings from the early 20th century. Most of it was in terrible condition- filthy and “fall apart when you touch it” condition, but of unquestionable historical value and- rinse later repeat- we couldn’t afford to do anything with it, BUT since it came no strings attached (it was donated by some descendant of the doctor who got it when cleaning out an old relative’s house and thought “this might be of use somewhere”) we did re-donate that one to the state archives.
Who had no money to do anything with it so it’s somewhere between the Ark of the Covenant and the gun that killed Garfield in its storage facility.
One library where I worked was offered a multimillion dollar collection of Japanese antiques, most of it in Samurai armor, weapons, and robes, all of it authentic and documented and centuries old. We turned it down because as much as we would love to have had it there was no way we could work the insurance, maintenance, display cases, etc., into our budget, even with the $25,000 one-time grant they were also willing to give. (Not sure whatever happened to those.)
So a point to mentioning the above: even if what you have is something really worth having,
We have a book giveaway about twice a year (we’re so small and students only that we don’t even try to sell them) and usually succeed in giving away about 3/4 of the stuff donated. Most people are perfectly okay and don’t care if we give their stuff away or toss it in the garbage, but you do get people who are very upset it wasn’t added to the collection. (I have a horror story about a professor who donated his “Third World Library” to a college I worked at in Georgia but I’ll spare you other than to say most of it was major league CRAP and his tax deduction estimate made it look like the Donation of Constantine.)
So if you ever want to donate the papers of your uncle the double Nobel Prize winner or your grandmother the Civil Rights icon or your dad who cured every disease that begins with a W, do some research first. If you’re fine with it staying in the storage room indefinitely and just want it out of the house and a tax break, then Freddy Joe Hickenlooper Junior College is fine and they’ll probably take it, but if it’s something you actually want available to the public you’ll probably want to go with a much bigger and, more importantly, richer place. That’s one reason Harvard gets so much stuff related to people who’ve never had any connection whatever to Harvard- they have the money and the staff to take care of it.
Prime example was Gore Vidal: he never attended college anywhere and donated his papers to his father’s alma mater the U. of South Dakota (where there’s a Vidal building named for his pa), and he donated the papers of his grandfather, Senator Thomas Pryor Gore of Oklahoma, to the U. of Oklahoma. Why anybody in academia was insane enough to accept a substantial gift from Gore Vidal without thinking he’d be a complete and total control freak in the first place is beyond me, but somehow they did and at both universities had to deal with him constantly hovering like a hawk and complaining they weren’t moving fast enough and then becoming furious when they asked him for money to catalog and accession and house the items he’d donated. (You’re talking about thousands of man hours of labor involved there and most public universities just don’t have the resources to do that for a collection that’s never going to be of more than limited interest and need.)
Ultimately he took them all back- a right that was in his original bequest contract and which I would guess they were more than happy to comply with- and donated both collections to Harvard, where he’s probably still driving the people absolutely bananas but they do have more money and people and facilities to dedicate to them.
