I am looking for information from new york dopers. Death of a close relative who had a large library of books. my sister was handling the sale and she tried the Strand, who told her to take a photo, which she did (one shelf’s worth) and sent it along and for whatever reason they rejected the books.
Does anyone have any suggestions to sell this vast library, or experience? thanks
The only way you’ll be able to get any money worth mentioning from it is if there are one or two volumes in that vast library which happen to be worth something, and even then, you’ll have to be the one to go through and find those one or two volumes. Otherwise, your best bet is to just donate them to your local Friends of the Library booksale or a little free library or the like.
EDIT: Oh, and I’ve reported this for a move to IMHO, where you’ll get better answers.
Moderator Action
Since this is looking for advice and experiences, let’s move it to IMHO.
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
Books, nowadays, are not worth anything anymore. Only if you’re willing to put in a lot of time and effort in listing them separately.
If all you are going to do is store them somewhere because they might be worth something, if you ever get around to selling them, then you will be throwing good storage money after bad money.
Heck, I got some three hundred year old books. Went to an antique bookseller, offered them for any asking price. He wasn’t interested.
What was the antique bookseller selling?
Very specific antique books.
That are specifically worth something, yes.
Yours probably would have gone better to a general antique market, assuming its binding was sturdy and attractive.
Look up a representative selection at Amazon or http://www.abebooks.com
This will tell you how much there is of value. Note you can sell books yourself on Amazon if interested.
A general used book store, not a antique book store should take them. Might get a few bucks.
Or Goodwill.
The library will take them, but just sell them.
I just looked into this a bit myself. I’m moving and decided that I’m probably never going back to paper books. I have a huge collection of classic lit that I hate to see go to waste, so I looked all over for places to get rid of them with a preference on donation. I looked at schools, libraries, Goodwill, books for soldiers and everything in between. Most places will accept, at most, a single box of books and everywhere you donate to will just resell them. Apparently, there just isn’t much of a market for books anymore.
This was my experience with my father’s book collection after he died. Lots of WWII and German/European history books, with decades of dust on them. Who knows when they were opened last. They were in good shape, but worthless, and not worth my time to try and identify the rare gems that would have been worth a few bucks. I picked-out a few that I wanted for myself, and donated the rest of them to the library bookstore, where they presumably either sold them or put them in the recycler. Such is the natural order of the life of books.
Well, Recycle Books in San Jose is doing so well in buying and selling used books that they opened a second store in nearby Campbell.
But no, they dont want that old encyclopedia set or those Readers digest condensed books or romances or old textbooks. SF, classics, mysteries, YA, etc, all sell well.
Likewise, there are Books Behind Bars groups in every state, I believe.
Is this thread making anyone else sad?
mmm
If they’re on a particularly esoteric subject you might have some luck - the right sort of old books on guns, for example, are valuable to collectors - but general mass-market paperbacks, coffee-table books and the like? Take them to a charity or community/social work group; pretty much no-one else is going to be interested, unfortunately.
Something you should do is check all the books for money. It is apparently common for old people to hide money in books. The other thing to do is check if they are signed.
Books are not a great seller these days but there are exceptions. If they are antique, first editions, or that sort of thing but another case is if they are on a specific subject or theme. Several hundred volumes on say coins, a given period of history, or the like can get folks opening their wallets wide. Don’t get me wrong; 90% of the time you are going to basically end up donating them somewhere. But for that odd 10% you can make out like a bandit.
(I inherited a 300 or so volume collection of early/pre-WW II car books, both fiction and non/technical. I got what I considered an obscene amount for the group as one lot.)
I have never seen a reliable figure, but I’m going to guess 99% would be a low estimate, as the number of books in the world that will never, ever, even once, be opened at any time in the future. Many of those (called “remainders”) have never been opened before, and never will be. They simply have no value, actually negative value because of the space they waste. They are not destroyed, because in so many minds, that is tantamount to “book burning”, and they are protected with the zeal of surplus baby puppies… But for over 99% of all books, their only value is as fuel.
This is totally false.
And by books, you mean Dianetics and the bible? Those are the books I’ve heard are historically best sellers yet rarely if ever see/hear of anyone reading.