alt Hacker News> It's a very good idea for a collector to own a place to keep the stuff.
Perhaps, but even for valuable things like musical instruments the floor space ends up being far more valuable than the objects. Hence the relentless march of waste disposal. It's very sad but a core fact of modern life that land is money.
(the phrase "housing company" implies that the collector did not even own a house for himself, let alone the collection..)
Unless you go deep rural. I've been to a few "bookstores" that were basically somebody's house, but an hour's drive to the nearest town and therefore only getting specialist traffic or people in the area for other tourism.
Used bookstores are increasingly online now, through abebooks or similar. In-store traffic has become progressively less important. This I think it was has really led to used book stores closing their doors. As long as the owner of the used book store can travel well enough to acquire books the business can sustain.