My siblings and I need to clear out an entire room of books in my parents’ house so we can sell the home. It is a bedroom filled with quite a few library shelves (floor to ceiling) plus lots of boxes of books. We are randomly guessing 3000 books. Dad was a bookaholic, and he enjoyed the education he got by reading about every conceivable subject.
Dad got great joy from amassing his random collection of books. Dad would buy from thrift stores and was not shy about spending a couple hundred bucks on a book if it interested him. We are overwhelmed after spending hundreds of hours decluttering the rest of the house, and are left with this one bedroom that you can only walk about 4 steps into the room right now.
For years we have talked about getting “someone” to come in and buy the whole lot of books, knowing there are some valuable books mixed in with the majority of lower value books. How do we get started with this project? And how do we trust someone to give us a good value for all the items?
Would love to hear from others who have experience in this area.
First of all, Ebay. See if any of the books are for sale and how much interest they engender. You can also donate the books to your local library or university library. Is there a rare book dealer near you?
I love my books. Some belong to my mother and grandparents. There are out “outdated” books, but there are some wonderful books. I collect books Probably nothing of great value but they are “mine”.
When we toured Blenheim Palace we saw the library. A football (seeming) sized room with glass doors…holding thousands of books…a dream
You can also try looking at “abebooks” for pricing info. But that would require going through, and searching for, the books individually. If you want to be appropriately reimbursed for any treasures, it might take a lot of work to carefully separate the valuable from the common used books.
Perhaps you can start by superficially separating into two or three piles according to presumed value – those clearly of little value and those likely of significant value at either end, with the “uncertains” in the middle. Donate the clearly less valuable books and just focus on the “special” ones. You would thus clear some space and have fewer books to work through carefully.
If there are any used book dealers in the area, perhaps you could ask one to stop by and provide some input, or arrange a consignment deal.
We are cleaning out books in a similar situation. Unless you have something truly collectible, I would suggest donating to your local library for their annual book sale. The parents here thought they had this wonderful and valuable collection of books…also several thousand. The reality was, not one book had any real value. So, we boxed them up and off they went to the library.
My MIL insisted that all of her magazines (think 10 years worth of National Geographic, Smithsonian, and the Economist) be donated to the local hospital. DH boxed those up too…but wait…somehow the car took a trip to the landfill instead. No hospital wants those…and neither do the libraries. They went to recycling.
@JEM, we are not in a position to look up each individual book. We were under the impression that we could get someone in to pay $2.00 or $3.00 per book and take the whole lot. Is that any truth to this notion?
Honestly, we don’t even want to touch the books. The ones on the shelves, of course, a dealer would have a sense of the collection. But the boxes and boxes of books stacked to the ceiling, I just don’t think any of us has the physical or emotional energy to deal with them.
Yes, if it comes down to it, we would just get a donation truck to come and pick them up. But it would still require us to lug every book/box upstairs and to the front door. If my mother was more financially secure, we would probably just go that route. But if money from this book collection could pay for a month of her assisted living costs, that would be a great relief to us.
Don’t hurt your back moving them to the library. I donated over 500 books a couple of months ago when getting ready to downsize, and ended up with a bulging disk in my lower back…
@thumper1, we know that the majority of the books are just regular thrift store books. But we remember Dad buying and showing off some old, expensive books to us. So do we just resign ourselves to getting into every single box and just looking for the more valuable books?
Also, forgot to add…my mom was notorious for sticking cash inside books to hide money at home. So, we do feel like we should flip through books before they leave the house.
Look up used book dealers in your area and contact. Generally, there has to be some lure for them to take a look. If you know you have some first editions or something of interest, or if the number of books are that many, you might get someone to take a look see. I donated boxes of junk books to Salvation Army and got a tax deduction That was the best I could do.
It was my recent experience that “valuable” old books rarely have value unless they are (1) first-edition, (2) truly rare and collectible or (3) otherwise in good condition. When we cleaned out my H’s parents’ house, there were shelves of old and “rare” technical and engineering, textbooks, photography books, much of them in dusty condition. No one wanted them, not even the libraries. We called Half Price Books – they said no or bring them in and they’ll take a look but they are already overwhelmed with stacks of used books. Decades ago, they offered me 25-50 cents for some old hardcover (not current bestseller type) novels so I knew that was not a worthwhile pursuit here.
Unfortunately the only way you would know the value of any book(s) is if you can get a book dealer to look through the collection and identify those copies or, barring that, you do that yourself. If you believe that is a worthwhile undertaking, you could enlist the help of an able-bodied person, go through the shelves, sort quickly a sample of books into boxes to see if this is even likely. The obvious ones would be easily identifiable as “coffee table” books, or whatever might have cost $200 or so. For those, your best bet is Ebay or Amazon reselling if you want the best price.
Otherwise, donate the books to a library for book sales or recycle. We learned that hard covers are not recyclable, only the paperbacks or the pages, and glossy paper is not always recyclable because of chemicals.
It sounds overwhelming. Might you hire a dependable high school student or service club to turn the pages looking for cash, look for first editions, etc., and cart the books off for a library fundraiser? Good luck!
There is no way someone is going to give you two or three dollars per book. You might be able to find someone to come and browse the shelves looking for something valuable, but otherwise your best bet IMO is to donate the whole collection to a library. My in-laws had a big collection too - and it was worth nothing.
I feel your pain. When we were helping my parents move to a retirement home, they had multiple collections that they claimed were worth tons of money. We spent a lot of time researching items and trying to find buyers, but the bottom line was none of their items were as valuable as they thought. They didn’t have books, but I think there is a parallel here.
The suggestion of hiring a kid to go through it seems good. If it’s a book lover they may be able to spot the potentially good / rare books.
I was curious so I googled - there seems to be a site called cash4books that has an app that if you scan the barcode, it will say if it will buy the book from you. Then there is a prepaid shipping label and they pay you via paypal. Haven’t tried it myself.
(I use goodreads to scan book bar codes to get them on my online list, but that’s not going to help much if you are looking for the cash value, I guess).
Edit: No chance he had any comic books is there? Or baseball cards? Those hold / increase value.
The good news is that we don’t have parents clinging to their books. Dad passed away years ago, and Mom has dementia and has no clue we are preparing to sell her house. So we siblings are going at this in a logical, unemotional way.
We want to honor Mom with as much money as we can get for her in all our dealings with her stuff, so I just want to make sure we are doing the right thing. That said, we are all exhausted with this house, it is not in a safe neighborhood, and we hope to get it sold before it costs us more money with vandalism etc.
Our sadness is that we all grew up in this house, and it was the best possible neighborhood with lots of kids to play with and roaming the woods was a safe and fun time for us. Now, we feel uncomfortable being in the house by ourselves, and never even go there at night.
Unfortunately, most used book dealers these days don’t buy whole lots unless there’s something in there they really want. The money in the trade has decreased - or spread around - with all those internet listings so they tend to cherry pick. Best of luck. We emptied out mom’s house and now I have a zillion little things no one wants and have to dispose of them.
When my sister’s FIL died, the family went through every single book and magazine in the place because that gentleman was well-known for stashing bills both large and small in between the pages. All I know about the amount recovered is that it was sufficient to guarantee a very merry Christmas for the entire family.
Look for a smart, honest teenager with no dust allergies, and put him/her to work on this. Maybe you can offer some split of the profits and/or $ recovered?
I agree…it is very unlikely that you will receive $2-$3 per book for your collection. Remember, anything the buyer takes that he doesn’t want, he will have to dispose of himself.
Are these books all boxed up? If so, where have they been stored?
If there are any plain old paperbacks in the bunch…you know…just plain old books…I would get rid of those first. Unless you have a limited edition of some collection of paperbacks, you won’t get much for them…at all.
If you absolutely must go through all of these books…page by page (remember, that money might not be in the front cover), it is going to be a huge time expense. But yes…hire a responsible teen. But recognize that the teen has to look through 3000 books…is the money you might find going to cover the huge amount of hours it will take to look through all of these books? Maybe not.
I love books, and I see the value in them. But really…unless I was sure there was some jewel in this collection, I would just donate to the library…or hope there is someone who is willing to come and get them…and not charge you!
Scholarme…if these are older books…they are NOT going to have a barcode. Plus removing 3000 books, and looking for and scanning barcodes is going to be time consuming.
Alas, you will probably find that a used book dealer will give you two or three dollars for the few valuable ones, and next to nothing for the rest. Your best bet is to donate them to a library that has a used book sale, and deduct the amount that it resells them for.
There’s a good chance that the collector is like me, and that the valuable books he bought at thrift shops are books that would be valuable if they were in good condition, had nice dust jackets, and were not library cast-offs.
I have always been something of a bibliophile, with dreams of having an extensive library. Well the library has never happened so last year I decided to get rid of 80%-90% of my books.( a little under 600 )I just kept things written by friends and the truly valuable. The rest I sold en masse for $100 to a local book nut under three conditions:
he had to take them all
he had to load them on his truck
he would never tell his wife who sold him all those books.
Not to be a killjoy, but any money found in the books is an asset of the estate and should be treated as such. Thereis nothing wrong with paying someone to go through the books (although I personally would not, it would just be too tempting if some large amount was found for them to pocket it). But just offering to split it without knowing what it is seems like it isn’t really what a responsible estate personal representative should do.