I wouldn’t say so, no. But again, in the interview I heard, he said he tried to sell the books, not give them away. He said he priced them at a dollar per book and they still didn’t sell. He never said he tried to give them for free. That’s why I consider burning them to be destroying them for the hell of it.
Might it not be possible that the burning was an attempt to stimulate sales? If you know someone cannot get rid of the books, there is no incentive to buy them, especially if you believe by holding out he will be forced to give them away. Hence if he starts to burn a few, people might realize that to get them they are going to have to pay something.
My grandfather was in Aden when the British Army left and tells similar stories about how the locals refused to buy the equipment the British were going to leave as they could get it for free later, until the British garrison commander started having it dropped into the ocean. It could be totally apocryphal, but what the hell.
When I left California in mid-2000 for a job overseas, I donated almost all of my books to the county library. All that was required was I bring the books to the librarian on duty. I returned to the US and, a few years later, a friend decided to donate almost all of her books to the library in the county where we were at the time. The library itself did not accept donations, but the affiliated volunteer reading organization did. They just required the books be boxed up and donated to them during their open hours.
Of course, neither of us had the volume the book owner referred to in the OP did.
You had the nerve to drop off the books though, so at least you weren’t spineless.
I know that the local libraries have to be picky about donations, but doesn’t this guy have a record of what he has in inventory? He could pass the list to the libraries and bookstores and see if there’s anything they want.
Unlike the books burned in the OP.
At some point, the extra 500,000 copies of “Who Stole My Cheese” have to be considered garbage and treated as such. I see no great tragedy in that. If it were rare or limited books, that would be a different story.
They can sell them at 10% of retail and still make a profit. Libraries also usually staff their sales with volunteers, so no additional overhead.
Where I currently work, which is essentially a technical college, a professor donated HUNDREDS- literally hundreds- of murder mysteries, both paperback and hardback, and we simply do not have the room for them and we’re so small we don’t have sales (though we have been known to have a “FREE” bin upon occasion with damaged or “not the least valuable to the curriculum and no other library would really want 'em” books). She was very insulted that we refused them (politely).
At another academic library I worked at, a professor’s widow donated a fortune in jazz records (dating from the 1910s to reel-to-reels to records to even a few CDs) and the library honestly didn’t have the money to archive them or enough music majors/enthusiasts on campus to appreciate them and so we tried to politely turn them down, but she insisted since he worked at our campus and so they’re in acid free boxes in climate controlled storage until the day funds appear to more properly accession them. (That same library has the papers and many personal effects of Miss Lillian Carter [including the dresses she wore to her son’s gubernatorial and presidential inaugurations and a rosary given to her by Pope John Paul I (that’s FIRST- as in the one-month Pope being considered for sainthood) and again- acid free well packed storage.
The largest library I’ve worked at was a series of 5 libraries with 2 million books and hundreds of employees and even they would have a very hard time sorting through 20,000 books and they’d have to pay to warehouse them til they had the time. Book donations are really appreciated but they can be a major pain in the ass when they’re not supportive of the curriculum and generally unsellable. Non classic/non literary novels just don’t move that much, and even if it’s a public library and the novels are by Stephen King/Anne Rice/etc., the library probably already has one and only needs spare copies when it’s new and everybody wants it. It’s never an insult if you donate books to a library and see them on the “a bag for $1” table, and it’s not insulting at all to say “I only want to donate this if it’s for the collection”. Donations can often be the most tact demanding part of a director’s job, explaining that you {quite sincerely} appreciate the gesture but just really don’t have the shelf-space/cataloging personnel/need for most of the books.
Of course a problem in academic libraries is professors who want to donate a box of crap related to their subject matter IN EXCHANGE FOR a big plaque saying PROFESSOR EUTHANASIUS BLOWHOLE COLLECTION and a $5000 tax write-off. We got trapped into this at one university where the professor went over the director’s head to the president insisting that we donate a WHOLE ROOM to his “Third World Library”. The director (one of my favorite ever bosses if not favorite ever people, incidentally- think every movie where Anne Bancroft ever played a raspy throated elderly smoker or Jewish mother) had told him, with considerable diplomacy, she didn’t mind in the least accepting them IF she could be selective, but it was all or nothing to him and he wanted the tax write-off and the room. The president okayed it, and that’s why the library has a former office that’s now the PROFESSOR A.S. SHOLE THIRD WORLD COLLECTION which includes such irreplaceable pieces as paperback copies of The Book of Lists (1, 2 & 3 no less!), copies of Caputo’s A Rumor of War, Leon Uris’s The Haj, and other bestsellers/classics that the library already had multiple copies of (in better condition) already in the collection, tons of former textbooks, and a bunch of other junk that’s never been and likely never will be checked out- basically 20 or 30 decent additions to the collection and 1000 pieces of dreck. The professor has since retired but his bio on all articles that he still writes always mention his room at that library and his great generosity in donating the (shitty) contents.
That’s the exception though. Most people are being nice when they donate, but often get offended that we don’t immediately (or ever in many cases) shelve their books.