I’m spending the week with my aged ma, before the Christmas spree, and apart from working remotely via MSTeams, etc, I’m also helping her declutter more than a century of possessions from earlier generations of our family. They were all avid readers, and there are still collections of books from those who were visiting the equivalent of Waterstones in the early years of the 20th century.
The easiest thing to do with the collection of ‘slightly foxed’ Trollopes, Austens, encyclopedias, other novels, religious tracts and fact-based books from before yesteryear would be to dump them in a skip. I don’t suppose the charity shops of mid Essex would care for them.
A valuer came round and was only interested in pristine first editions and unique curios, so we know they aren’t worth much. But a quick image search on Google suggests there may be an interest in these repositories of previous generations’ cultural mores.
Any suggestions on how to get these tomes to suitable homes? Or is it into the bin for ’em?
My mum left her modest collection of books to Amnesty.
I’m curious. What were they able to do with them, Twang?
They have bookshops – we took them to their Cambridge shop. She had some interesting of not valuable books and they were very happy to have them
Thanks – that suggests to me I use the Oxfam Books route that Gatz recommended below.
You could try “Sell Your Books”, née Ziffit, or “Music Magpie”. It’ll be pennies they offer, but they pay postage.
Just looking on music magpie you’ll work out if the book is worth something or not. Anything valued over a couple of quid on there is probably worth a tidy amount on eBay. Just a thought.
The sites look interesting, thanks! Though as most of the books predate the introduction of the ISBN system, it may be a challenge to use. I’ll explore further.
Edit. I see there is a searchable catalogue. The first book I tried – The Outline of History by HG Wells – was on there. Offer price: 15p.
Bookfinder.com will give you the price other copies of the book are currently on sale for. It doesn’t mean that it’s the price they sell for. You can use the ebay Completed Items option for that. The prices in green are the ones that sold.
An Oxfam bookshop might collect if you have enough, but they won’t take encyclopedia or dictionaries.
The Oxfam at the top of Chelmsford High Street sent a bloke around to mine to collect a large amount of books as well as CDs, DVDs and vinyl when I had to cull for a house move. They had to send him a few times actually, he only had a small car to fit the loot into.
Good idea, I think I’ll contact them to find out more. The books they have in there tend more towards the antiquarian than the chazzas in Witham.
I passed on my parents sizeable library to the local Oxfam in about twenty rucksack loads. Many no doubt pulped but they always took them. I did a pre sort but the vast majority they took.
This is what happened when my brothers and I cleared the family home three years ago. They seemed delighted to receive them, but you can’t help feeling that this must happen all the time in a place like Knutsford.
I kept a very small percentage of items (vinyl, books, sheet music, the occasional artefact) because we had reckoned that they may be worth selling. They are still sitting in a corner of my house, with no further action. It will be just too time-consuming to go through the faff of selling them.
I think that if you say to a charity shop ‘ would you like a thousand books?’ the answer can be no, but if you bring them in 50 at a time they are much more ready to accept. Absolutely the time/reward equation of 99.99% of any clearance stuff is firmly in the negative. I do however have a couple of rare football programmes of my dads we will sell – that is it.
I use We Buy Books. Generally, once you scan a book via their app, you’ll see that they pay next to nothing or say “No thanks”, but occasionally they’ll pay a tolerable sort of sum for the right book, especially if it’s fairly new or has just been turned into a TV series or film.
If I can get £20 or so for a box-full, with them paying for the Royal Mail to collect the books, that’s better than nothing (I’ve given plenty of books to charities over the years, and my local charity shops now appear to be so swamped with books that they’re turning donations away).
Wrong time of year but we’ve always done quite well at car boot sales, going with the intention of not bringing anything back. Last time I think we did paperbacks @ 50p, hardbacks for a pound or two. Criminal when you think what they cost but better than taking them to the tip.
Good suggestion. There are a lot of non- literary items, including aged and well looked-after tools with nice wooden handles that could bear with being disposed of that way. When the weather is brighter/ days are longer, some of the books could be taken along.
Book swaps are handy – don’t know about your neck of the woods, but there are two or three round here, and it’s a matter of moments to walk off whistling with an empty carrier bag.
I had the same problem when my parents moved to a retirement village. There were ancient books in a box in the attic, not all in good condition. I looked up a few on abebooks, eBay etc. My son, then aged 17, insisted that we should list them all. I had so many other things to attend to and I told him if he wanted to become a secondhand book delaer to go for it. That shut him up. In the end I kept the ones that were written by my Dad’s great uncles and turfed the rest. As someone said above, if they’re first editions in immac condition then they may be worthsomething
This thread chills my blood. My thousands of books and other media are my other family. My other friends. The thought of them divided and unloved…. gulp.
This thread is causing me to re-evaluate my hoarding of physical media. I have a lot of it. Books, CDs, DVDs. Oodles of detritus. No doubt the job of sorting it all out will fall to my two nieces. Then there are my daubs and scribblings, lots of that too. I of course won’t give a fig after my demise for the onerous task that I will have landed them with so I have decided that the only course of action left open to me as a loving uncle is to add to this mountain of crap as much as possible. It’s the least I can do.
That’s the ticket!
Payback for the hours of babysitting the blighters.
There are so many people in the same situation. People dont want them. End of.
How much time do you want to spend researching sorting? 90% you know will be not worth anything.
Chuck rm and focus on those few that either interest you or might be worth something.
Life’s too short.
I’ve just thrown away the majority of my home-taped cassettes at last – removing the inlay cards as a lightweight/low volume way of keeping the memory alive. It’s a bit like pulling off a plaster – best done quickly and letting the air get to it. Advancing well into the last of the pre-retirement years, the memory banks need emptying more often to make space for new things. Some things are more resistant than others.
I’m literally in the middle of digitising an old cassette tape of a gig I did with some mates in the early 80s – one of them is dumping all his tapes but wants that one.
I’m having a major purge at the moment. The loft was rammed but I’ve got rid of more than half of it and more goes this week.
Before we moved this year we’d had to clear out one or two of my books, black bin liners (20 something at least) filled with books two journeys to the Oxfam bookshop in Headingley.
As they were gift aided I received a letter saying they’d made 400 pounds on selling some probably my collection of folktales, folklore and mythology books.
We’ve just had bookshelves built and I’m emptying boxes of books and loading the shelves. By the Lord Harry they’re bloody heavy. Remember “books do furnish a room” and they make pretty good insulation too.
For anyone thinking of lining their loft space with books as insulation, remember lots of books mean lots of weight and also they are flammable.
But of course you all know these things.
I’m with the ‘Sqeezer school of thought. Carry on accumulating and give your relatives something to do, after you’re beyond caring about “stuff”.
I’ve done some major disposal since I retired, books especially, some to Music Magpie, some to charity shops, but the vast majority to the bin men and thence the local incinerator. The sudden realisation that time is too short to read them all was a big incentive. It lessens the likelihood of the ceilings collapsing, but also affords new space which perversely will get filled with yet more crap.
Yep, always say it, next year is the time to really get rid of books and the dreaded vinlys.
Gotta make tough decisions, especially on the cuddly toys… but the hedgehogs are staying obvs.
I am slowly, very slowly, turning my thoughts on my stuff – books and music – away from ‘this is all the music I will ever like or need’ (to which the answer is always just one more) to ‘this is all the music I like and need at this time’ which then opens up the door more easily to the thought ‘i liked this once but I don’t now’ – see you one-track pony Who Are You? Deeply underwhelming Weller album Illuminations etc etc. The 80-year old me may need a copy of both (which have mysteriously vanished from mp3 and streaming), and we’ll deal with it then.
Having gone through the painstaking process twice of clearing out aged parent’s houses – just be kind, get rid of as much stuff as you possibly can and do it NOW!
Anything else is just unkind, unthoughtful and Wrong. Yes, of course, somewhere in your mountain of detritus is a first edition Dickens or always thought lost Beatles Live In Hamburg but 99.89% of the rest is just that, detritus. Spare a thought for your successors: leave them good memories, a little letter saying how much you love them and a loft full of absolutely nothing.
There’s a mindset that everything ever published or recorded will be online eventually, if it isn’t already. The sum total of human culture preserved forever online.
I seriously doubt that’s the case.
I think there are large swathes of stuff that will never ever be digitised and some of what has been digitised is going to be lost eventually because it lacks sufficient commercial value.
Regardless of quality, writings that no longer fit the current mindset of what is publicly asseptable are being removed, rewritten or censored. The same with TV, radio and movies.
Funding for archival and cultural projects that don’t fit a prevailing political or social framework are currently being defunded or closed down completely.
Is there real evidence that obscure books, TV shows etc are not to be found somewhere on the internet? It constantly amazes me that you can, for instance, search for “How to change the sprocket stabiliser on a Kenwood 324C kettle” and sure enough there’s a video of some bloke showing you exactly that. My own random searches for books on “Life in Aberdeen 1965-7” or “that 1950s kids telly show starting a robot who was called Zak or was it Bongo?” seldom if ever fail. I may be once again Wrong but all of life does seem to be there if you look hard enough.
In some ways, I see the digitisation of content as like the history of enclosures of common land in the UK – a shared resource released for general use and creative endeavour by Tim Berners-Lee has gradually been feudalised so creative content is harvested and profited from by tech bros. And who controls the content, the algorithms, controls what people consume and believe.
Any labour-saving device starts off offering convenience and additional free time, then becomes a crutch enforcing dependency, and ultimately a prison, constraining action and thought to a certain accepted mode and form.
There’re is a lot of content online, and increasingly more. But I still come up against areas where there is nothing. Google members of earlier generations of your family or long lost classmates, and you may find nothing at all.
Maybe it’s a good thing that not all is online. For a while I thought blockchain might enable a breakthrough for networked cooperatives of makers and creatives, empowered by creative commons licenses and Shareware. Uber and AirB&B etc seem to have left little space for that.
The most powerful algorithm of all is the biological one that drives human greed.
Ten years ago, when my dear mum passed away, it fell to me to clear everything out. Two book-cases full of Glasgow/Scottish historical / factual / myths and stories / maps went to Norry Wilson, who runs the lovely Lost Glasgow Facebook page. He was delighted to tell me that the week after I dropped them off, he was asked if he could deliver a presentation on the Lost Villages of Glasgow, and he used two of the books I had passed on to do that.
There were a handful of others which I knew would be special to some dear friends, so I gave them those. I kept a small number myself, and gave the rest, in various quantities, to various charities that she supported – Cancer Research, Shelter, Marie Curie. Near the end, I still had about 20 boxes to move. I phoned Oxfam and they collected them. I gift-aided all the charitable donations (as a UK taxpayer) and was delighted that they did so well from them.