I went to a local estate sale of a professor, whose entire downstairs (4+ rooms) was filled with bookshelves full of books. They were well organized by topic, and covered a range of topics (math, science, health, fiction, biographies, etc). It was more functional than artistic, comparing it to the pics in this post, but the number of books was probably the same order of magnitude as our local public library’s collection, or a small bookstore.

I went at the end of the 2 or 3 day sale, and it still looked full. They were charging fair prices for the used books, but were going to pay to haul the remainder to the dump. I’m still unhappy about the waste, even though I mostly understand it.