Comment by e28eta

13 hours ago

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.

Disheartening to say the least. A cache like that would sure to a have single volume that would more than pay for the price to pay to have them moved and stored for a year… the idea that there are countless volumes of that caliber most likely in a collection like that means whomever is responsible is literally throwing money away… based on what you’ve described I could easily see a collection like that fetching at least a hundred thousand dollars, maybe substantially more.