So what do you do with a bunch of OLD books? My husband has about 50-70 books that date from the late 1880s to the early 1920s, all in pretty good shape. Some of the titles are pretty bizarre and most of them are pretty obscure (as in I’ve never heard of any f them). I hate to just throw them out. There’s a well-known seller of old obscure books nearby, but I don’t know if it’s even worth dragging them down there…
I was talking to the book buyer at Powell’s Books in Portland recently. He told the story of a woman who brought in a bag of books. Most were valueless. But one was some 1930’s book on investing that was worth over $10,000 IIRC.
Powells will take books they can sell as will other used book stores. I got $3 in store credit for paperback “Gone Girl”, for example. If you have a lot of books they want you to make an appointment. If you have a used bookstore near you, you might take a box or bag in a little at a time if you think they have value.
Good idea TatinG…but the OP has several thousand books. It’s going to take a long time to take in a bag or two at a time.
I agree…concentrate on the open shelves first.
But I know that what is really valuable, and what my inlaws think is really valuable do not align. They have agatha Christie paperbacks on a shelf they keep moving from house to house. But their decent hard bound books are in some box in their attic.
For doG’s sake do not throw them away!! The fact that you haven’t heard of them doesn’t mean much. People collect and enjoy all kinds of vintage books; for example, WW1 era memoirs and novels, vintage boys/girls adventure series, and on and on. I particularly like the work of John Taintor Foote, and have been happy to acquire vintage copies of his books. No, I’m not going to pay a lot of money for them, but they are valuable to me and don’t belong in a landfill!
The books that people should be throwing away–if anything!-- are current best sellers, book club editions, textbooks, and stuff like that.
50-70 books is nothing. Take them to a used/antiquarian bookseller, look them up on alibris or the like.
I also went into Powell’s rare book room and scanned the titles of the most valuable books. Most I had never heard of. The Journals of Lewis & Clark in an early edition (which of course I knew) was selling for $25,000.
Spend an evening searching the titles through Ebay and see what they are selling for.
If you do donate them, use It’s Deductible (you can create a free account online, it is an Intuit product). They make it super easy to value them if you are just donating some or all. And you can print out a nice donation record to staple your receipt to and toss in your tax file. I actually have more to donate than the 500+ I gave away last year – I ran my taxes in 4th quarter to see how the year was looking, and realized I was going to get snagged by AMT for 2014. No tax benefit to additional donations, so I stopped making trips to donate anything until after the first of the year. Have started up again, though. 
After dealing with some similar issues after my dad passed away, I have sworn never to keep something just because it might be worth something one day (which is something my dad often said about some of the items I still am not sure how to deal with.) That is my caution to you…do get it done and taken care of lest you still have boxes of books in your own garage years later due to indecision. 
On donating to the library: someone said they wouldn’t want them, but check to be sure. Our library accept donations, keeps a few select books, but sells the rest as an ongoing fundraiser.
We did very well with three sets of books. One was FIL’s collection of Russian and Soviet Satellite country books/maps/ephemera that the university library took. He had to get an appraisal, but got a whacking big tax deduction for the donation - $60K? The second was science fiction from the late 40s’, 50’s and 60’s, including a lot of old Science Fiction magazines. Scientologists pay big, big bucks for the original L. Ron Hubbard stories in the science fiction magazines. Some others also had significant value. The third was early computer science books – not textbooks – which I sold on Amazon. Several university libraries bought them.
The huge collection of general fiction MIL had didn’t yield anything. We just took it to the thrift store. A local used book buyer might be willing to come to the house and cherrypick the volumes. It wasn’t worth the time for me to deal with that – we just boxed them and got them to the thrift shop.
Our library has a “Friends of the Library” group that runs sales twice a year and takes donations for several weeks ahead of the sale. I think the library gets to cherry pick for free if they want to add something to their collection, otherwise they are put out for the sale. They also keep a cart for sale in the library all year round (donations that come in between the sales or stuff that didn’t sell). If you called our library to ask about donating, they would direct you to that group.
I had the same issue with my parents several years ago, and was able to get a local bookstore to come to the house and give me an offer. I had several days to accept the offer, and did take it – plus the bookstore picked up all the books. It was a painless and easy transaction. I have no regrets.
So, you might try that. If possible get two or three different bookstores to come to the house. They should not expect a decision on the spot.
Regarding high value books… there aren’t that many books which will fetch a good price. In fact, in some cities, it can be hard to sell books at all, because not that many people read. There is some possibility that your dad knew if he had any valuable books and kept them all together. You might get an intuition about a particular group of his books. If so, set them aside for special attention by the book dealer.
Also, maybe get that neighbor to sort your books into hardcovers and paperbacks. You will get next to nothing for paperbacks. Indeed, maybe literally nothing.
@thumper1, 1975 and recenter is not yet old enough for sci-fi, though I think this household could easily get tempted to fill out the collection!
@scout59 If the books are beautiful leatherbound books some interior decorator might want them for a fake library.
Mathmom…I can make you a deal you just can’t refuse.
mathmom, I lent a few SF/fantasy paperbacks to a co-worker circa 1980. When I asked after them after some period of time, he said, “Oh, I threw them out. I always throw out paperbacks.” These were no longer in print. I was actually speechless. (A rare occurrence. )
Who throws out borrowed books?! For a while I was throwing or giving away our books because after all I could get them out of the library. Then I realized the library was throwing them out faster than we were - so I’ve gone back to being a book hoarder. Especially stuff like sci-fi paperbacks - not that easy to find replacements. They hardly ever appear at the library book sales.
I’d like to mention one place to donate books:
Better World Books. They are major used book re-seller and give a portion of their profits on every book to US & world literacy non-profits.
http://www.betterworldbooks.com/info.aspx?f=beginning
If you are donating 8 or more cartons of books, BWB will send you boxes and pay your shipping.
Contact client services at BWB for details.
They also have book drop boxes in many states.
http://www.betterworldbooks.com/go/donate
When my library does a shelf purge, we donate our books to BWB. The library also buys books from BWB if it’s at all possible. (I do too.)
R:; old SF paperbacks--the place to donate those (and possibly borrow via ILL) is to the Jack WIlliamson Collection at Eastern New Mexico State University's Golden Library.
The collection has well over 15,000 volumes, including paperbacks, magazines, SF pulps, correspondence and manuscripts, dating from 1900 to the present.
It's one of the best SF collections in the US.
<a href="http://www.enmu.edu/academics/library/collections/jwsf.shtml">http://www.enmu.edu/academics/library/collections/jwsf.shtml</a>
I've spoken with collections' curator several times. Aside from the 15,000 documented items, there are rooms full of undocumented/uncataloged materials. When the transporter gets invented (because I don't want to actually live in Portales, NM), I'm going to spend my retirement cataloging his back room….Oh brother. I am not showing this thread to my husband. I really want the 1000 or more SF books out of my house. Gone. Super if he can get some money for them or donate them to a worthy cause. But if he thinks they are worth something, he is going to keep them (like father, like son).
I know we have at least four copies of Dune. I know because I’m the one who packed all of these books into TEN large Rubbermaid bins! No one has opened the bins in 20 years. To me, that’s an indication of how much one really needs the books. They don’t.
Ha, ha, Thumper. My husband thinks a lot of the junk in his mother’s house, along with his junk is worth something or or will be. And I’m not letting him near your house, or those bins could end up here.
Even I don’t want four copies of Dune! We only kept multiple copies of a couple of books we thought younger son might want to cart off one copy of when he sets up on his own.
Just one note: the suggestions to get a Kindle or get books from the library are good ideas for readers; they are irrelevant to book collectors. A book collector will buy another copy of a book he already has if the dust jacket is in slightly better condition.
One other point, as suggested by some of the comments above: if a collection of books include a lot of books of some particular type, or on one particular subject, it is more likely that somebody would be interested in buying those books. What really has little value are general books, and especially paperbacks. If somebody has a lot of high-end art or photography books, or books about architecture, or first editions, or something, there may be more value.
My husband is not a book collector. He has four copies of Dune because he wanted to reread the book, And didn’t have the time or inclination to look through his boxes of stored books. There is a difference between hoarding and packratting…and genuine collection.
If the OPs parent was a book collector, the vast majority of the books would be of some worth. That doesn’t sound like the case. Like many, he read his books,mthey refused to part with them.