One of Britain's largest stocks of second-hand books ever amassed

I just helped clean up the estate of an uncle of mine that died. He'd collected an absolutely massive amount of books during his lifetime. Besides that he played the violin and had collected an equally impressive amount of music books.

I managed to save some of the rare works but I could find absolutely no takers for the bulk of the books, at any price or even for free. That generation is leaving behind an enormous amount of paper and it is mostly going to waste. Very frustrating, if I had had the space I would have been happy to take all of it. I would have read some and I would have tried to find a new home for the remainder but that takes time and the housing company only gave us two weeks to vacate the place, which was much too little time even for proper cataloging. Fortunately he had already organized things to the point that it was obvious which ones were the precious ones.

And the violin got a good home. The guy lived like a monk, the whole flat was just paper and shelves, and a tiny spot for a bed. You could have made the pictures in this article in his flat as well (I didn't make any, it was too sad of an occasion).

My own books I keep giving away on the promise that whoever gets the book will read it and pass it on. That way they stay alive for a little bit longer. Some books I keep buying again just so I can have the pleasure of giving them away once more. Douglas Adams' hhgttg is probably the record holder.

The University of Toronto has a free store and they place items departments discard into 2 areas. 1 area can be grabbed by other departments for a month - then it goes into a public swap shop area for Wednesday AM. Lots of assorted stuff but they place cubic meter boxes of all manner of books, old journals, reference books etc. In the same vein, I have seen dozens of old book stores close over the past 20 years. Truly rare books and incunabula

https://fisher.library.utoronto.ca/collections/incunabula

I think Ebay was the beginning of the end. Most books in the past ~100 years were printed in substantial press runs, and many had reprints. That meant they were not globally rare, just widely scattered. Ebay revealed their vast numbers and a level marketplace emerged. Books dealers snagged the truly rare and the vast bulk went unwanted and unread. As a Northern claim staker and mine engineer, I often passed by the Highway Bookstore, in Cobalt Ontario

https://www.highwaybooks.ca/

I can only imagine the feeling of visiting this bookshop. Hopefully these books will find a good home.

I just went to Chruch street in Bengaluru which is full of bookshops like this (obviously not at this scale). Bookworm (a new gem I found) and all 3 Blossoms bookstore (famous in Bengaluru) shops is what I covered on my recent visit. Morning 11:30 till evening ~6:30 buying 19 books. And happy to report that it was really crowded as well.

Being a collector is an affliction. A huge house given over to his collection while he relegates himself to the groundskeepers cottage. A lifetime acquiring money to grow the collection. I hope selling it gives him some peace.

I hope these books make their way to good homes! There are so many books that are out-of-print and, because they aren't widely known, and the author has passed away, they're very unlikely to ever be republished. Those books will become more and more rare with each passing year. This "great middle" section of books is slowly going missing.

I can imagine the smell that greets you walking round this amazing collection of books. I'd love to browse. I have a Kindle but it has had a flat battery for years now because I just love paper books too much.

This can't actually be one of the largest stocks of second-hand books. That's just 50 of me, and I only have a couple walls full. He's got 25 rooms, which very much sounds like 50 of me. I'm poor, I'm not special.

I wish I could get rid of them all; when I want to read one again I just pirate a scan. I've literally thought about tightly wrapping them in plastic and burying them in a concrete vault. After the original texts of all "legacy" writing have been deemed too provocative, somebody could discover them and dig them up, show their friends how they've been changed since everything went digital, and shortly afterwards get arrested as a terrorist pornographer.

This is what I come to hacker news for - great post

Man, this makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. I just love books, have a large collection of my own (though obviously not on the scale of the article) and am always on the lookout for offbeat books (old/new/whatever) on any subjects that i find interesting. With Internet Archives/Project Gutenberg/etc. you can of course have your ebook versions but there is nothing like having a hard copy in hand.

The right book at the right time can often be transformative opening up your mind to new ideas/possibilities and leading to better knowledge and wisdom.

For example; reading Bergen Evans' The Natural History of Nonsense (https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.77094) from 1946, one of the earliest books on skepticism w.r.t. people's irrational beliefs/thinking/behaviour teaches you the importance of critical thinking for yourself which is arguably even more important today. A good review from Goodreads here - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2099042654

Another good collection are the excellent science/mathematics books from the erstwhile USSR many of which are now available at https://mirtitles.org/ A subset of those titles are available in hard copy form from low cost publishers on Amazon India. Checkout for example B.N.Ivanov's Fundamentals of Physics (https://mirtitles.org/2018/04/21/fundamentals-of-physics-iva...) and Roman Podolny's Something Called Nothing: Physical Vacuum: What Is It? (https://mirtitles.org/2013/11/24/something-called-nothing-po...) both of which are interesting takes on aspects of Physics.

Those photos!

I love libraries of all kinds, and wish LLM training development will drive even greater preservation and digitization efforts. I sure hope someone preserves this collection, installs a dry fire extinguisher system, and digitizes into the Internet Archive what doesn’t already exist online.

over 1 mile of shelf, he wants 1.5mill£ for the whole estate, and he will stay on

I wonder if an AI company will quietly buy and scan.