My sins are American History (pre-1865) and numismatics. My advice to the cousins who will have to deal with 3k plus of these is check titles online to see what (if any) are marketable at the time of my demise and/or use some of the contacts they make at the funeral or through my address book for the rest. And at a certain point, box it and drop it off for the nearest library sale.
My mother is retired and spends several hours a week working at a public library. You would be surprised/angered/shocked/horrified by what happens to any book you donate. Essentially none of them will ever be stocked on a library shelf.
First, if the library is lucky enough to have the staff to do this, the book will be check for re-sale value. If the book has some re-sale value, say $20 or higher, it will go into the hands of volunteers who will re-sell it through online sources like Amazon, eBay, ABE and others. All other books are sold at relatively fixed cost, based on what is found online.
Books deemed worthless are sold for a fixed cost by the pound to a recycling company. Textbooks and magazines almost always are instantly placed in this category.
You need to start looking now for someone with your interests online, and make those arrangements with that person. You also need to codify this in your will. Presumably you can find a Board online for the historical period or something similar to help enable this.
You can also begin to value some of your books online, and see if the value of the collection would enable you to bequeath the books to a university. As noted, however, this does not guarantee that the entire collection would be preserved. Your best bet is to find a similar hobbyist or historian and bequeath the collection to him or her.
As a historian by training, I can say that much of your collection would be interesting to me, but my interests end with WWII more or less. There are others on the Board here who are Cold War enthusiasts, if you wanted to begin your search here.
Best of luck.
If you want to donate to a library that can handle high volume, I’d recommend Tompkins County Library in Ithaca, NY. As others have said, they won’t accept donated books to go on their shelves. But they run a huge book sale (it’s supposedly the third largest in the country) twice a year. They will accept high value collectible books but their main stock is general used books. So they can handle it if you have a collection that contains tens of thousands of books.
I do this myself - sort donated books, and list valuable or rare items on Amazon. We also send things we can’t sell that the library and local museum don’t want to an auctioneer. Some gets recycled, and some gets passed on to another re-seller (in our case, Better World Books, which gives us a percentage of the profits) and others are donated to thrift stores.
Pretty much the only thing that may find its way into circulation, besides books purchased for this purpose (usually as a memorial) are donated books from 2016, and now 2017. And yes, we’ve gotten a few 2017 books - all of them Harlequin romances.
This is an interesting discussion topic and something I’ve wondered about too, especially after a recent clear-out where I found I had a car boot full of books to donate.
In the end, I split them up among various op shops (charity stores).
None of the books were worth enough to try and sell (second hand book stores only give credit on books, and I’m trying to reduce the number I’ve got) and the local library also has more books than they know what to do with.
There was a situation here a few years ago where one of the major charities was telling people “No, we don’t want your crap stuff (because it costs us a fortune to have to dump it because it’s totally unusuable)” and that turned into a perception that “[Major Charity] doesn’t want people to help them or donate stuff to them because they’re not good enough” - it became a bit of a PR nightmare for the various op shops in general so now they’re told to accept all donations with a smile and a thank you.
There may be a school library that would use such a collection of books. Not necessarily locally! There are plenty of countries where a library of history books in English might be at least appreciated a little bit.
I guess the ideal solution is to find another history buff that would continue your enthusiasm.
Yeah, I was thinking of something similar, but with caveats. Soon after you die, nobody cares about preserving an intact collection of your random crap. But centuries or more later when your everyday stuff becomes forgotten and exotic, it becomes valuable again (cue visions of archaeologists digging up old outhouses and marveling over broken bits of porcelain.) So what you need to do is invest in a watertight underground vault for your complete collection, and if it stumbled across in a few hundred years are more, will be greatly valued by historians.
Our town “Friends Of The Library” group only accepts donations at certain times. They put up announcements stating that they’ll only take certain genres and nothing over X years old. In other words, “Don’t dump deceased Great Aunt Gertie’s library on us.”
I still have my dad’s collection of military history (mostly WWII) books as well as the complete series of Churchilll’s “History Of The English Speaking Peoples”. They’ve been sitting on bookshelves for decades. It may sound weird, but I’ve never touched them because they’re one of the very few physical reminders I have of my dad.
They probably will end up in the trash, as will all my books including my 200+ cookbook collection.
I guess I’m very lucky to live in a place with an enlightened library. My college library (University of Houston-Victoria) has open stacks for the general public, and happily accepts donations. They have hundreds of old sci-fi titles, which were donated. When I take books over to donate, they have a standard form to be filled out by donors. You can even request to have any titles returned to you if the library doesn’t want them.
However, I take over only a few selected books, and I check their catalog first to make sure they don’t have them. If I showed up with several moving boxes of books, they might give me a different answer. If you’re really interested in finding a good home for books, take the trouble to be thoughtful yourself about the interests of the recipients. Otherwise, just put them in a dumpster yourself, and save someone else the trouble.
Vaguely, charity shops (in the U.K.) = op shops (in Australia) = thrift stores (in the U.S.). But that ignores a lot of differences. Charity shops tend to be small in the U.K. and do a lot of new stuff in addition to the old stuff. Thrift stores in the U.S. tend to be larger and don’t do any new stuff. I haven’t spent enough time in Australia to know what op shops are like.
My vote is to plan on making life easier for everyone. My wife and I have already experienced what it’s like to clean up after deceased family members, and I wouldn’t want that process to be any more difficult for my kids.
I struggle with other people’s stuff in my home–whenever something ends up in my basement, we cannot get rid of it, and we must treat it as if it were an adopted child…but if my sister-in-law hasn’t asked for it in 18 years, then why am I storing it?
The idea that we need to cherish something that comes from another family member, dead or alive, is one of the things that causes our lives to be filled with clutter.
When my brother passed away many years ago, I had to figure out how to deal with tens of thousands of dollars in guitars, keyboards, and recording gear. I dumped it all at the local music store for pennies on the dollar. I’m expecting the same to happen to my own instruments and tools when my day comes.
Cookbooks sell very well at FOL sales.
If they have value and you’re not actually still reading them, sell them and enjoy the money now. Something similar is happening to me. A comic collection. Realized that the books are only going up at about 5% a year, yet I’m paying 12% on my credit card bill. So do I sell my Amazing Fantasy 15 (which I really haven’t looked at in over 20 years) and save at least $160 a month on interest on my card a month. And if I should die in a year, I got nothing from my decades of collecting. And the people who would get them would sell them immediately.
Which is why a librarian I know spent two afternoons smashing records in the 80’s. They didn’t want anybody offering to take them away. Now of course they would just order a locked skip, but that wasn’t available here at that time.
nm - already covered by others upthread
I don’t want to rain on your parade, but that’s a lot of work to ask of grieving family members who probably don’t have any interest in your books.
Maybe you could find a friend who would be willing to commit to that, but probably not.
If there are particular pieces of your collection that are especially meaningful to you, you could bequeath these to family and friends, most of whom I am sure would be happy to have a volume or 2 by which to remember you. Almost nobody is going to want dozens (or more) though.
Beyond that it’s probably best to get used to the idea that your collection is going to cease to exist along with you.
I’m sure it has, but it’s not a good solution for a number of reasons.
-
If you want to refuse donations, then the person receiving donations has to be able to determine on the spot if something can be sold. Instead of having a book expert and a furniture expert and a mens clothes expert go through them later and make that determination. That’s a lot harder to do well without high labor costs.
-
If you refuse donations, you’re going to get people out of the habit of making donations in the first place. If I brought a load of stuff to a charity and they picked through it and took a few choice items, that’s probably the last load of stuff I bring to that charity.
-
It wouldn’t solve the problem you want to solve anyway. Someone who brings a load of stuff to a charity shop is just one step above someone who’s just going to pitch the load in the trash. If my stuff was worth my time to sell it, I’d already do so. I’m bringing it to the charity shop because I think it has value to them. If I’m wrong, one of us is throwing it away. Does it really matter whose garbage can it goes in?
You got that right.
I used to take stuff to Goodwill. Then one day I went with a fairly unusual load of stuff–books, sheet music, a funky belt sander, and some other odds and ends.
The guy in the back immediately frowned at the belt sander and said “We can’t take that” followed by a very careful picking through of everything, telling me that they didn’t want the books, didn’t want the music, didn’t want this, didn’t want that. To be honest, I think the tool was what set him off.
I asked him if I could toss the stuff in the dumpster and he answered in a very threatening tone, like “no, and if I catch you doing it, …”
I understand that they pay to have trash carted away, and they can’t accept everything under the sun, but the guys don’t need to be surly.
On two other occasions I took stuff there and had folks laugh in my face. Once I had some Christmas decorations in their original boxes and a guy laughed at me and said “Christmas was two months ago!” in a mocking tone–he could have simply said “Sorry, but you have to understand that even if it’s good stuff there won’t be any demand for it until the end of the year and we just can’t store it.”
It’s because of that attitude that I no longer donate to Goodwill.
These days, anything other than clothing gets put out at the curb in front of our house–there is so much traffic there that somebody always picks it up before trash day. Clothing goes to a different charity organization (not Goodwill).
Donate them to a nursing home ! People can’t get out anymore and some elderly people love to still read books . I would end my mom a box of books when she was in a nursing home and she loved it!
^^This.
I was going to suggest trying places like hospitals for the waiting rooms and hospices, or even donating to prisons.