This made my heart sink. I have a sizable book collection, not nearly as nice as that one, but there are a few ~$200-1000 editions in there. Mostly though they are books I've read and loved, or learned a lot from, and when I go I fear there will be no-one to give the collection to, just as there has been no-one to loan them to. I cannot imagine just breaking up and selling a parents collection! It feels wrong somehow, like a betrayal. It could easily be justified by practicality - clearly the author made a ton of money, and will save the price of storage costs over time. I hope he at least kept a few of the most important books that his parents loved, and I hope his own children do not sell his collection like this.
I'm in the same camp, I've been collecting old golden-age science fiction books for a whole (with plenty of others as well along the way.) my wife enjoys the same so we regularly acquire bags of books. Road-trip holidays are the worst :)
I think it's worth understanding that the joy of collecting is the collectors reward. Collections have little actual value [1] and you should understand that when you are gone your collection will vanish, likely for no money. The cost of sorting it, cataloging, selling etc is too high.
The best person to enjoy your collection is you, and the best time is now. Collecting is fun, not work. Have fun, don't worry about the collection's future, and assume it will all be burned.
[1] if you think you have value, you need to sell the valuable parts yourself before you pass. You can't expect some family member to figure out which 10 of your 1000 books are worth money.
Ideally I hope to sell the whole collection to another collector one day. He will get it really cheap. I recently bought 120 books from someone, sight unseen. He took half what I offered. I'm still working my way through them.
I love that era because most of it was rubbish, but there are hidden gems. Frankly I get pleasure from most of the rubbish as well. It's like watching old B movies.
So if you have a bunch of old sci-fi books to sell, going to a good home, for little money, drop a note here and we'll figure out how to get in touch :)
Would I recommend young readers broadening their world older sci-fi at first? Nope; there are so many more recent titles that won't put them off with outdated modalities. Reading much of old sci-fi today requires having quite some baggage to be able to appreciate them. The stories themselves remain good, but the trappings and often the social interactions extrapolate the future from our past rather than our present.
Does my home library have shelves of Asimov, Heinlein, Wyndham, Sturgeon, et al? You bet it does.
Reading Lensman now really is like watching an old B-movie — it even feels black and white.
@bruce511: I think we would enjoy browsing each other's libraries, our wives included (although our collection isn't fancy in terms of editions at all, with plenty of paperbacks).
yeah mine is 95% paperbacks. Most in somewhat-poor condition. They were printed cheap 70 years ago, and the fact they are still viable is an achievement in itself. They are getting hard to find now, partly because 2nd hand bookshops don't stock them because the condition is too bad.
I imagine younger readers would struggle to get into the genre, although I think a lot of the big classics are still accessible. Seeing Dune as a big recent movie shows, I think, that a lot of the themes were tireless and haven't changed. I'm often amazed at how some things could have been written today, with the same social angst, but were written in the 40's or 50's. Poul's insight into advertising (The Space Merchants), Bradbury's commentary on censorship and offence (Fahrenheit 451) are both ones that spring to mind. But these are not isolated examples - there are lots of others. (Erik Frank Russell's Wasp is a perennial favourite and works as well today as ever.)
> They are getting hard to find now, partly because 2nd hand bookshops don't stock them because the condition is too bad.
In the Netherlands a handful of second hand shops who specialize in sci-fi and fantasy show up at the huge yearly outdoor book-fair in Deventer. We always pick up a bunch of those old paperbacks there (in the original English obviously). This August the fair returned for the first time since the start of the pandemic shut it down — only 500 stands instead of the usual 800, so hopefully next year will be back to full strength. I would expect such specialised sellers (and large book-fairs) to exists in most countries (although the Deventer one is the largest in Europe).
Good recommendations, Dune certainly is as good now as then (I guess, being born after its release), but I wouldn't blindly recommend everything by, say, Heinlein (like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress stands the test of time, but many of his juveniles and later works are an acquired taste). Good bookshops and publishers already do a lot of that curation by their choice of new editions of older works of course.
yeah, Heinlein is not my favourite, and I find most of his stuff to be hard work. I really wanted to like Stranger in a Strange Land (because it's an awesome title) but alas it seems like every book is trying to push some specific social agenda which may have been big at the time (or maybe not?) but now just seems out of place.
>> In the Netherlands a handful of second hand shops who specialize in sci-fi and fantasy show up at the huge yearly outdoor book-fair in Deventer.
consider yourself lucky then! There's nothing like that here. Which is perhaps good for my wallet...
I have shared my experience before of helping my father inherit his father's 39,000 books. A collection that occupied three apartments and was worth hundreds of thousands even back then.
I hate books now. Hate. Please don't burden your successors with thousands of objects that are important to you and not them.
John Hodgman says the difference between hoarding and collecting is a display case.
A display case limits the number of objects that can be in someone's collection at a time. Good collectors get to a reasonable collection size and then operate on something like a one in, one out policy.
Sorry you had to go through that huge burden. I had a hoarding grandparent (not anything to that extent). It was painful to dispose of as the belongings were filled with mold and everyone got sick while throwing it away.
The books are going to people who want them. I think that in that way it is pure gain.
Of the books around my house, those that mean the most to me are not generally the most valuable. In fact, I'm not sure what I have that is really valuable, though I am confident that I have very few books I couldn't replace for $50. Yes, a first edition or two, yes three signed by the authors--though not inscribed to me.
I expect that my son will unload my books as best he can, if I don't deal with them first. I think that is well. He is an intelligent man, he reads widely, but the intersection between our areas of interest is only so large.
> no-one to give the collection to, just as there has been no-one to loan them to
You can always donate them to GoodWill.
I’ve also seen many areas where people have built little book shelves with a roof, on their front yards, right next to the sidewalk, with signs for people to take books (and contribute as well if they want).
There’s still plenty of people that appreciate, read and exchange physical books.
No, you are entirely missing the point. You are listing ways to get rid of books as if I don't know about goodwill, or the local library's book store or how to light a bonfire. The problem is that people in my life, and in general, don't give a shit about books, but they are important to me, and that contrast is painful.
In that case it seems like you could either find a way to try to break the attachment, or build more connections with (maybe new) people who do appreciate books as much as you do.
I get your pain, but unless you do something about it, it’s probably just going to continue or get worse.
Have you considered the fact that, if someone says, "My child has cancer and will die soon, it makes me so sad," and someone chips in with, "Maybe learn to be less attached to your kid maybe?" that this is clearly cruel. And it's a terrible kind of cruelty because its wrapped in ostensible compassion. It's the misuse of what is essentially a Buddhist principle to attack a person after they've revealed vulnerability. This is representative of a whole category of anti-social interaction that doesn't get enough attention or awareness. (This is similar to how it is underappreciated how the truth can be used to tell lies.) What makes this attack particularly pernicious is that if you push back on it, like I did, you yourself get attacked, because after all the person was just trying to help.
I kinda thought this would be an article about possessions and a lifetime spent gathering them; what they mean, if anything, and what to do about them as generations change. That to me would make a more interesting read than one that focused on "whether books are still relevant" which was really where this one went.
I'm grappling with the former problem so maybe it's just right there in my consciousness right now. I've got a house full of parental possessions - including hundreds of books collected over a lifetime, and I've got to get rid of them. I love books but just don't have the space for more. The journey is hard and very poignant.
You might find the book 'How to Archive Family Keepsakes' by Denise May Levenick interesting. I bought it myself to read and haven't gotten very far into it yet (always so many distractions), but it seemed like it had some interesting and useful stuff in there.
Part 1's title, for example, is called "I Inherited Grandma's Stuff, Now What?"
My widowed father lives in a 4 bed family home. My widower mother-in-law lives in a 3 bed house with a massive basement. I have a 2 bed apartment that is full already. There isn't any space!
I read something like that recently you might like:
> The great junk transfer is coming. A look at the burden (and big business) of decluttering as Canadians inherit piles of their parents’ stuff. Sorting, storing and disposing of old family belongings will be a labour-intensive challenge in the next decade as baby boomers age.
Here's a sci-fi story about tech-assisted cataloging of parent's stuff
"Using this kind of technology on a living human’s home would
be a gross invasion of privacy. But if you use it in the home of
someone who’s died alone, it just improves a process that was
bound to take place in any event. Working with Infinite Space,
you can even use the inventory as a checklist, value all assets
using current eBay blue-book prices, divide them algorithmically
or manually, even turn it into a packing and shipping manifest
you can give to movers, telling them what you want sent where.
It’s like full-text search for a house."
Doesn't seem like as big of a problem as people make it out to be. You hire a skip and move the vast majority of stuff in to it over a weekend. Maybe garage sale off the stuff that has some value.
I have to question what people are doing where they can fill a whole dumpster with junk every few years. Perhaps buying less crap would be a good start.
If he's that into cuckoo clocks he's probably in touch with other people who share the interest. Talk to him now to find out who those friends are. Those are the people you offer the clocks to.
It also means you get to spend time with your father talking about something he likes. That time together is what you will be thinking about when passing those clocks on.
Contact with his collecting friends is an excellent suggestion.
I'd also recommend considering distributing some of the collection to friends and relatives. Something small like a single cuckoo clock could be a great memento to remember them by. It's not a burden to take one clock the way a whole collection would be, of course people should still be asked if they would like to have it rather than being voluntold.
My great uncle had a wonderful collection of beautiful old hand tools and made a point of distributing a portion of them to his various relatives and friends who had expressed interest. The bulk of the collection went to the relative who was his son in all but fact, but I have some lovely calipers and a handmade hammer that have a cherished place among my tools. Far from a burden, I remember uncle Mac fondly each time I see them while grabbing some pliers or a drill.
My grandmother has made us go around putting sticky notes with our names on all the stuff we want when they downsize or pass. Everything else will go to goodwill or the dump. The secretary desk my grandfather fished out of the dump in the 60s is a hot commodity that everyone is trying to lay claim to.
They're definitely not "small" being wall clocks but the idea of giving away mementos is excellent. I'm not aware of him being member of some circle, formal or informal, understandable when you live in the sticks and don't do much internet either...
I just recently got rid of most of my physical books. I finally accepted the reality that the books were just taking up room. They weren't even useful to me. Most were never going to be read again and should I ever need any of them I can just download a copy. Every time I got rid of one I felt like a whole chunk of my memory was being removed. It wasn't easy but I could not deny the situation. I totally understood what the author was going through.
We like to accumulate things but ultimately most is just stuff that gets in the way.
Borges, out of anyone in history, would be the one most against getting rid of your physical books on account of them "taking up room." Anyways, having physical books on a shelf, stacked up on a corner of a room, lying scattered throughout, regardless of whether you will read or re-read them, gives us a healthy reminder of all that we do not know (like the starry heavens above), which is indispensable.
Yeah but I'm not making room for room's sake. my house is not some Scandanavian still life. I have boat loads of tools I need for projects and my wife has baskets of fabric she needs for sewing. It is a matter of choosing between what helps me be productive and grow vs. what is serving as a reminder of where I've been.
Last year I spent a few K of my play money to buy some really nice editions of works I always wanted to have, used. Many of those are Easton Press, some Folio Editions, some Suntup, etc. On AllOfCraigslist I found someone in mid-west? Or maybe south-west? don't remember anymore selling their library of Franklin/Easton nice books for essentially about $20 a pop. They had hundreds of books, I think I bought a couple of boxes, like maybe 30, 35 books? I spoke with the guy on the phone (craigsist across state lines needs that, right) to discuss payment and shipment, the books are fortunately not a big scam target for that, anyhow, the books showed up, all having lovely stickers inside "From the Library Of *** ***). I asked what happened, he said they bought them for their son who mostly never read them, and they didn't want to feel sad after looking at them anymore. They're much more appreciated here in my house, where all but a few have been read by now.
Earlier this year I had to help clean up some of my dad's books after he died. There were about 200 legal books where various relatives said "surely these must be useful to someone" so I spent hours typing a list of titles and authors and dates of publication, so someone still in the business could review them. I doubt a single one of the books was still useful. The rest of the books were obviously even less valuable - outdated travel guides, political rants, dozens of books that had obviously never been read. Overall, a depressing and infuriating experience. The only good part was that there were convenient drop-off boxes for paper recycling near the house so I could do many carloads in one day.
Yeah no kidding, my wife has all her law books sitting around and it’s basically 300lbs of worthless crap. Not a single one will ever be opened again lol
The thing is that without some form of search cataloguing, even if there were useful information in there, you would have to already know about it in order to look for the details and the information would then lack context, e.g. subsequent developments in that area.
Contrast with Google or a specialist electronic service
"The books can be read when the solar powered website is down due to bad weather. In fact, the content can be viewed with no access to a computer, a power supply, or an industrial civilization. A printed website also serves to preserve the content of Low-tech Magazine in the longer run. Websites don’t live forever, and the internet should not be taken for granted."
TikTok needs to conduct surveillance, data collection and sell advertising.
Books do not need any of that. They do not even need electricity.
The former would seem far more brittle over time.
Lest we forget that the existence of "tech" companies, i.e., commercial websites that do not sell anything to their visitors, is a teeny-tiny blip in the history of information, almost indistinguishable unless one is right up close to it. We are literally living in that blip, so our perspective is, for lack of a better term, severly nearsighted.
I can't imagine that anyone would ever disagree that tiktok serves a more ephemeral usecase; I don't see what you get from comparing the two.
You would probably make your point more strongly comparing books to online libraries like JSTOR which contain huge amounts of valuable research but restrict its access.
"Will books keep mattering in an age where Instagram and TikTok are the glasses-stomping bullies shoving them aside for the contested space in people's brains?"
> In fairness, books have a complicated history in my family. One delayed my own fretful entrance: When the doctor wanted to induce my mother’s labor, she asked him to come back in an hour as she wanted to finish Dürrenmatt’s “The Visit.” Not long before, she’d gone to see her own father in the hospital. Sensing that she wanted to leave but felt too guilty to say so, he assured her he had plenty to keep him company and patted the book tented on his chest. He died during the night.
> Books were also cudgels in my home. If you weren’t reading enough, you were informed. I was once made to spend an entire day at a beach house locked in a room until I’d read 80 pages. Was that tough-love character-building or a way that my father bought quiet so he could get back to whatever wind-whipped pages he was immersed in that day?
I wish I was born in that kind environment. Most of my family members are not avid readers, some don’t even read at all. I got lucky because I read more than the average, which is not difficult to do considering the low average books read per year of the people around me. Though, I do wish I have the inclination to read much much more, or at least be pushed to read more than what I’m comfortable with.
I just bought a couple of reference books with knowledge that I consider stable for the upcoming years.
For certain things, I find it more convenient to quickly look them up in a book than in today's internet where I have to deal with ads, cookie banners and surveillance and/or monthly subscriptions.
The ideal compromise would be to digitize these books before they are gotten rid of. Have your cake and eat it too, in a sense. If only it weren't so difficult for the average person to pull off.
The co-creator of Modern Family and showrunner of Frazier (massively successful shows) would surely be able to either help “settle the estate” or buy the volumes they wanted at auction. Can imagine sibling squabbling forced the sale but this essay seems a bit disingenuous.
> Mr. Lloyd is the co-creator of “Modern Family” and the longtime showrunner of “Frasier.”
...okay, yeah, I completely believe that the showrunner of Frasier would be able to write an article like this. (No aspersions being cast, it's just so very on-brand with the show.)
