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 Nope; there are so many more recent titles that won't put them off with outdated modalities.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 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 :)