What do you do with old books?

[fuckip]

My partner left academia several years ago and is now open to clearing all the thousands of old books that he never uses or touches.

Many of them are old, even a bit tattered, not good enough for donating but the idea of taking to the skip feels heartbreaking.

Can you just give them to somewhere like oxfam?

Is there an academic looking second hand bookshop in your university town?

We have just unloaded a load of books to Amnesty and Oxfam bookshops in the neighbouring university town, both are obviously catering to an academic customer.

There are a few unis nearby but no academic bookshops, no. I guess I could look and see if there are any within a few hours drive though, thank you!

Can he message his former colleagues? DDad was an academic and when he retired he offered up many of his books and his colleagues descended like locusts (one, memorably, with a wheelbarrow and his wife to help!).

I wouldn’t trust Oxfam to understand the value of academic books (even in a university town) based on DDad’s experience of volunteering there and having to ‘rescue’ valuable academic texts that were ‘tatty’ and were going to be pulped.

I'll suggest that, thanks. Good to know about oxfam too, I was hoping that perhaps they'd be good at sorting "valuable" ones out but I guess you can't rely on volunteers to know that in reality.

When I moved I have mine for free to students. I put them in the building lobby corresponding to my subject area with a note 'Free - please help yourself'.

Recycling bin basically.

Certain old textbooks are prized, but most are best only for pulp.