Saying goodbye to my parents’ library
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You can always donate them to GoodWill.
I’ve also seen many areas where people have built little book shelves with a roof, on their front yards, right next to the sidewalk, with signs for people to take books (and contribute as well if they want).
There’s still plenty of people that appreciate, read and exchange physical books.
I get your pain, but unless you do something about it, it’s probably just going to continue or get worse.
I think it's worth understanding that the joy of collecting is the collectors reward. Collections have little actual value [1] and you should understand that when you are gone your collection will vanish, likely for no money. The cost of sorting it, cataloging, selling etc is too high.
The best person to enjoy your collection is you, and the best time is now. Collecting is fun, not work. Have fun, don't worry about the collection's future, and assume it will all be burned.
[1] if you think you have value, you need to sell the valuable parts yourself before you pass. You can't expect some family member to figure out which 10 of your 1000 books are worth money.
Ideally I hope to sell the whole collection to another collector one day. He will get it really cheap. I recently bought 120 books from someone, sight unseen. He took half what I offered. I'm still working my way through them.
I love that era because most of it was rubbish, but there are hidden gems. Frankly I get pleasure from most of the rubbish as well. It's like watching old B movies.
So if you have a bunch of old sci-fi books to sell, going to a good home, for little money, drop a note here and we'll figure out how to get in touch :)
Does my home library have shelves of Asimov, Heinlein, Wyndham, Sturgeon, et al? You bet it does.
Reading Lensman now really is like watching an old B-movie — it even feels black and white.
@bruce511: I think we would enjoy browsing each other's libraries, our wives included (although our collection isn't fancy in terms of editions at all, with plenty of paperbacks).
I imagine younger readers would struggle to get into the genre, although I think a lot of the big classics are still accessible. Seeing Dune as a big recent movie shows, I think, that a lot of the themes were tireless and haven't changed. I'm often amazed at how some things could have been written today, with the same social angst, but were written in the 40's or 50's. Poul's insight into advertising (The Space Merchants), Bradbury's commentary on censorship and offence (Fahrenheit 451) are both ones that spring to mind. But these are not isolated examples - there are lots of others. (Erik Frank Russell's Wasp is a perennial favourite and works as well today as ever.)
In the Netherlands a handful of second hand shops who specialize in sci-fi and fantasy show up at the huge yearly outdoor book-fair in Deventer. We always pick up a bunch of those old paperbacks there (in the original English obviously). This August the fair returned for the first time since the start of the pandemic shut it down — only 500 stands instead of the usual 800, so hopefully next year will be back to full strength. I would expect such specialised sellers (and large book-fairs) to exists in most countries (although the Deventer one is the largest in Europe).
Good recommendations, Dune certainly is as good now as then (I guess, being born after its release), but I wouldn't blindly recommend everything by, say, Heinlein (like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress stands the test of time, but many of his juveniles and later works are an acquired taste). Good bookshops and publishers already do a lot of that curation by their choice of new editions of older works of course.
>> In the Netherlands a handful of second hand shops who specialize in sci-fi and fantasy show up at the huge yearly outdoor book-fair in Deventer.
consider yourself lucky then! There's nothing like that here. Which is perhaps good for my wallet...
I hate books now. Hate. Please don't burden your successors with thousands of objects that are important to you and not them.
A display case limits the number of objects that can be in someone's collection at a time. Good collectors get to a reasonable collection size and then operate on something like a one in, one out policy.
Sorry you had to go through that huge burden. I had a hoarding grandparent (not anything to that extent). It was painful to dispose of as the belongings were filled with mold and everyone got sick while throwing it away.
Of the books around my house, those that mean the most to me are not generally the most valuable. In fact, I'm not sure what I have that is really valuable, though I am confident that I have very few books I couldn't replace for $50. Yes, a first edition or two, yes three signed by the authors--though not inscribed to me.
I expect that my son will unload my books as best he can, if I don't deal with them first. I think that is well. He is an intelligent man, he reads widely, but the intersection between our areas of interest is only so large.
I'm grappling with the former problem so maybe it's just right there in my consciousness right now. I've got a house full of parental possessions - including hundreds of books collected over a lifetime, and I've got to get rid of them. I love books but just don't have the space for more. The journey is hard and very poignant.
Part 1's title, for example, is called "I Inherited Grandma's Stuff, Now What?"
You go through, take what you want, and call them.
You get less money overall but it’s very hassle-free.
Cuckoo clocks are scary.
It also means you get to spend time with your father talking about something he likes. That time together is what you will be thinking about when passing those clocks on.
I'd also recommend considering distributing some of the collection to friends and relatives. Something small like a single cuckoo clock could be a great memento to remember them by. It's not a burden to take one clock the way a whole collection would be, of course people should still be asked if they would like to have it rather than being voluntold.
My great uncle had a wonderful collection of beautiful old hand tools and made a point of distributing a portion of them to his various relatives and friends who had expressed interest. The bulk of the collection went to the relative who was his son in all but fact, but I have some lovely calipers and a handmade hammer that have a cherished place among my tools. Far from a burden, I remember uncle Mac fondly each time I see them while grabbing some pliers or a drill.
My grandmother has made us go around putting sticky notes with our names on all the stuff we want when they downsize or pass. Everything else will go to goodwill or the dump. The secretary desk my grandfather fished out of the dump in the 60s is a hot commodity that everyone is trying to lay claim to.
> The great junk transfer is coming. A look at the burden (and big business) of decluttering as Canadians inherit piles of their parents’ stuff. Sorting, storing and disposing of old family belongings will be a labour-intensive challenge in the next decade as baby boomers age.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-the-great-jun...
"Using this kind of technology on a living human’s home would be a gross invasion of privacy. But if you use it in the home of someone who’s died alone, it just improves a process that was bound to take place in any event. Working with Infinite Space, you can even use the inventory as a checklist, value all assets using current eBay blue-book prices, divide them algorithmically or manually, even turn it into a packing and shipping manifest you can give to movers, telling them what you want sent where. It’s like full-text search for a house."
https://www.iftf.org/fileadmin/user_upload/downloads/th/ByHi...
OTOH art books and children's books are valuable exactly in their physical form, they are not just text.
We like to accumulate things but ultimately most is just stuff that gets in the way.
Contrast with Google or a specialist electronic service
"The books can be read when the solar powered website is down due to bad weather. In fact, the content can be viewed with no access to a computer, a power supply, or an industrial civilization. A printed website also serves to preserve the content of Low-tech Magazine in the longer run. Websites don’t live forever, and the internet should not be taken for granted."
Books do not need any of that. They do not even need electricity.
The former would seem far more brittle over time.
Lest we forget that the existence of "tech" companies, i.e., commercial websites that do not sell anything to their visitors, is a teeny-tiny blip in the history of information, almost indistinguishable unless one is right up close to it. We are literally living in that blip, so our perspective is, for lack of a better term, severly nearsighted.
You would probably make your point more strongly comparing books to online libraries like JSTOR which contain huge amounts of valuable research but restrict its access.
> Books were also cudgels in my home. If you weren’t reading enough, you were informed. I was once made to spend an entire day at a beach house locked in a room until I’d read 80 pages. Was that tough-love character-building or a way that my father bought quiet so he could get back to whatever wind-whipped pages he was immersed in that day?
I wish I was born in that kind environment. Most of my family members are not avid readers, some don’t even read at all. I got lucky because I read more than the average, which is not difficult to do considering the low average books read per year of the people around me. Though, I do wish I have the inclination to read much much more, or at least be pushed to read more than what I’m comfortable with.
Public libraries FTW.
For certain things, I find it more convenient to quickly look them up in a book than in today's internet where I have to deal with ads, cookie banners and surveillance and/or monthly subscriptions.
...okay, yeah, I completely believe that the showrunner of Frasier would be able to write an article like this. (No aspersions being cast, it's just so very on-brand with the show.)