Do you think I should get rid of some of them?
I used to work for a publishing company. One of our authors of historical fiction did a great deal of genealogy research, and as a result, from time to time she came upon or received donations of entire book collections. Typically from relatives who'd inherited the collection after somebody had died. These people didn't have any use for them, but felt bad about just throwing them away, so had been holding on to them for years or decades. Upon finding somebody who actually
cared about old books, it was a delightful relief to finally be rid of them in a way that made them feel they'd given them to somebody with the emotional investment they thought these books deserved.
Most of these books became packing material or were simply tossed into a recycling bin because they weren't even of any interest to somebody who was specifically interested in old books.
So with that in mind, here's my advice:
1) Once in a great while, one of these books turns out to be
rare. Don't get your hopes up. It doesn't happen often. But it might be worth your time to check ebay and see if some random one of them happens to be worth a couple hundred dollars.
2) Old bibles and similar religious family books are
very commonly used to track genealogical information. Check the front and back covers, title pages etc. of every single one of them for hand written notes. During the 1800s especially, frontier families and people living in places other than big cities would track births and marriages in family bibles. Sometimes that information exists in county recorder's offices, and sometimes it
doesn't. And in those cases, from time to time when somebody decides to write a book about a person or area, they will go and track down the surviving families of people who lived in the time and areas they're writing about, to get information that doesn't exist anywhere else. 10 years from now you might make some researcher very happy if you take the time now to check for any of these kinds of records in those books.
3) If you want to use them as decorations, go for it. However, I assure you that the sort of people who will be impressed by a book collection will
know if those books are random collections of nothing in particular. If you want to impress people, Aunt Margaret's Farmer's Almanac from 1822 is not the way to do it.
4) If you decide to not keep them, I advise taking them to your local library, explain the situation and let them take care of it. Mostly likely they'll pick a few to put in their used bookstore for $1 each, and recycle the rest.
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Topic: Inherited old but useless books (Read 3179 times)