What to do with all the "stuff" you inherited?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This came across my FB feed this morning and it made me think of OP:

Hehe, that is funny. my in-laws are not hoarders. Their house is very neat and clutter free, yes they have a lot of books, but nothing like the hoarder you are picturing.

[Anonymous]

OP, this isn't very common with books but it's a very common situation with coin collections. With coin collections (and likely books) 90% of the value of the collection is in 10% of the coins. Those are the only ones I would keep and the same is true for books. I mention this because a family member passed away and left us a huge coin collection. Most of it was just junk that they saved but there were a few valuable ones in there. You can find a lot of websites on what to do with coin collections you get from family estates. Apply that knowledge to the books. The best solution, honestly, is to have them get rid of the bulk before they die but once the books are your DH's, they're his to do with as he pleases.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It is DH's family tradition that DH gets all the books from his parent's library, I estimated there will be 20k -30k books (could be more, I can't count all of them, I head that many cases of books are in storage, not on shelves). Our modest house cannot possibly hold all those books, so what do we do? Passing down the family library is their tradition started 3 generations ago. Will it hurt their feelings if we tell them we can't handle the number of books? Shall we build a big house to house all the books once we are a bit older and have more $$? We can't afford a big house right now. And also I probably would want to downsize later in life anyway, I wouldn't want a 5000 sqft house when I'm retired.

Maybe you never have to inherit books, but maybe you had to deal with other "stuff" passed down to you. What did you do with those "stuff". Any suggestion?

Do you want the books? The tradition is only 3 generations old. You can break it. Donate the books to a library.

[Anonymous]

Sorry, OP but that's a shitty "tradition" disguised as an enormous burden.

I'm a bibliophile and have been the executor of my grandparents' and never-married great uncle's estates. All lived into their mid-80s and had accumulated a lifetime of belongings, some valuable, some worthless.

At least you have some lead time. Start a conversation w/ DH and maybe his parents with a concrete plan, as other PP suggested: get it appraised, now, on site. Maybe your ILs would be willing to go through some of the collection to cull it a little or a lot? What if (and only if you are personally interested) you asked to look through and take a few books you know you'd want to keep/read/enjoy/display now?

No way should you accept 30k books or even entertain the idea of building a house or library large enough to accommodate this all.

I'm a bibliophile and did not keep every single book I inherited. Many I just use as props for their interesting old fonts on the spines.

[Anonymous]

17:38 ugh didn't mean to use bibliophile 2x...working and took a call in between sentences

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It might soften the blow if you create a space for some books in your current house. Get some nice built-ins for the rare books and say how important it is for you to have a piece of the library in your house, but you won’t be able to keep all of them.

+1

Be gracious and considerate of their feelings. They think they are doing you a favor, so treat the ILs kindly about the matter. They want you to have them, but it is just not practical.

OP here. I agree with you, but I don't know if there is a way at all to decline the offer and still make them believe we are gracious.

ILs are very nice people though, but older people can be sensitive you know. I do not want to hurt any one's feelings. If we had a mansion I would be happily take all the books, well, maybe not happily.

Then maybe fib to them and take them, but don't keep them. Donate them to a good cause - a school, or something they would not be all that mad about, if they were alive.

They sound like good people, trying to do a good thing. I would feel differently if they were pushy and entitled about it.

There is plenty of room for you to be kind to your ILs, who sound very nice but misguided, without compromising your house. Put the books in a storage facility for the short term when you inherit them, and then call in the used book experts. Let them do the inventory and identification of anything valuable, and then donate. Your DH may want the list anyway - books tell you a lot about people. I could see myself going through a list of my parents' books and laughing "what the hell did they get that for?" or "huh, I didn't know they were interested in X and Y." Also, it sounds like there is a lot of history since it's been a generational thing. It'd be a shame to lose all that. You can keep the titles and information but donate the physical books.

This sounds good, but my experience is that appraisers are very expensive and you pay them per hour. I think it would be worthwhile to have an appraiser go through the books to see if there are any rare first editions etc., but, if you really want an inventory, I’d hire a college kid to do it.

And if it’s three generations worth of books, I believe it could be 30,000 titles. My husband and I recently thinned out our library and gave away over 40 boxes of books (and we still have several bookshelves full). That’s just what we happened to accumulate — we weren’t trying to build a “library” like OPs family. It’s totally possible that each generation contributed 10,000 books.

Hiring college kids to do inventory is a great idea! It'll be faster for the appraisers to identify potentially valuable books if they're just scanning a spreadsheet as opposed to digging in boxes, so you'll pay for fewer hours of their time, too.

I am OP, I would actually enjoy inventory the books, if I retired and have time. I love organizing, and labeling things, and inventory.

Go get a job at Walmart then.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There may be treasure in those books and not just monetary treasure.

Two stories:

1. I have an acquaintance that owns a book store and he related to me that he was able to convert a $500 estate sale book collection (7 books) into $250K worth of book sales/trades over a 6 month period of time. He started with low dollar trades using his personal list of contacts in North America and Europe to repeatedly sell and trade from his estate sale starting point in order to get a couple of very valuable sales at the end. The initial sales were for several hundred then it bumped up to 7/8K then a series of 25K book sales/trades and the last one was around 50K and when it was said and done he had a couple left over that he put in his store. He said that it made his year. These books were old bibles, prayer books, Hymnals, and the likes. Not all old books have market value.

2. I personally have a couple of old history books (early 1900s) and a few old math books (1800s). The history books in particular were eye opening to me in that they provide a perspective on how people though at the time which doesn't align with the modern narrative that people today project onto people of that era. These books are not valuable except that when I found then it brought into sharp focus that modern education is revisionist, watered down, and agenda driven. If you want to know something it is better to get it from the original source than to merely believe a 3 or 4th hand source.

On a final note, I have about 24 linear feat of books that consumes 4 book shelves. They are mostly science (math/physics/engineering) books which I use periodically as reference materials. My wife occasionally suggests that I throw them away. She sees no value in the books. She gets her information from YouTube and social media. Our local library is almost exclusively children's fiction and romance novels.

OMG...can someone share the cliff notes?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This came across my FB feed this morning and it made me think of OP:

Hehe, that is funny. my in-laws are not hoarders. Their house is very neat and clutter free, yes they have a lot of books, but nothing like the hoarder you are picturing.

Ha. BTDT. My parents "bequeathed" me three storage units full of valuable things like all their phone bills from the 1980s.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There may be treasure in those books and not just monetary treasure.

Two stories:

1. I have an acquaintance that owns a book store and he related to me that he was able to convert a $500 estate sale book collection (7 books) into $250K worth of book sales/trades over a 6 month period of time. He started with low dollar trades using his personal list of contacts in North America and Europe to repeatedly sell and trade from his estate sale starting point in order to get a couple of very valuable sales at the end. The initial sales were for several hundred then it bumped up to 7/8K then a series of 25K book sales/trades and the last one was around 50K and when it was said and done he had a couple left over that he put in his store. He said that it made his year. These books were old bibles, prayer books, Hymnals, and the likes. Not all old books have market value.

2. I personally have a couple of old history books (early 1900s) and a few old math books (1800s). The history books in particular were eye opening to me in that they provide a perspective on how people though at the time which doesn't align with the modern narrative that people today project onto people of that era. These books are not valuable except that when I found then it brought into sharp focus that modern education is revisionist, watered down, and agenda driven. If you want to know something it is better to get it from the original source than to merely believe a 3 or 4th hand source.

On a final note, I have about 24 linear feat of books that consumes 4 book shelves. They are mostly science (math/physics/engineering) books which I use periodically as reference materials. My wife occasionally suggests that I throw them away. She sees no value in the books. She gets her information from YouTube and social media. Our local library is almost exclusively children's fiction and romance novels.

OMG...can someone share the cliff notes?

1. 7 books worth $500 from an estate sale were converted into $250,000 by trading up and selling - take away is that there might be significant $$ value in those books.

2. He has a few old books and he finds their content has intrinsic value.

3. His wife wants him to throw away his books because she doesn't read and the local library only has low quality books

The point appears to be that people don't care to read and don't understand the value of reading.

The "OMG" poster proved the point.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It is DH's family tradition that DH gets all the books from his parent's library, I estimated there will be 20k -30k books (could be more, I can't count all of them, I head that many cases of books are in storage, not on shelves). Our modest house cannot possibly hold all those books, so what do we do? Passing down the family library is their tradition started 3 generations ago. Will it hurt their feelings if we tell them we can't handle the number of books? Shall we build a big house to house all the books once we are a bit older and have more $$? We can't afford a big house right now. And also I probably would want to downsize later in life anyway, I wouldn't want a 5000 sqft house when I'm retired.

Maybe you never have to inherit books, but maybe you had to deal with other "stuff" passed down to you. What did you do with those "stuff". Any suggestion?

3 generations old physical books? Some may be worth a fortune. Carefully catalog them and look for opportunities to sell the ones that may get some $. Keep the oldest ones and sell the newest. Donate if you can't sell. Fireplace fodder if you can't donate.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I inherited a couple of old books. A copy of Alice in Wonderland, printed in about 1930. And a sequel to the Wizard of Oz, printed in 1902. I have looked them up and they are worth about $10 each. Big Whoop.

Excactly. Valuable books are rare. Where would OP sell them? Ebay?. Ask someone what it's like selling books. The plans posters are discussing re having the op hire kids or appraisers to go through a huge volume of books to look for the "good" ones is ridiculous. There are many, many, many old books around today. Age does not make them valuable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Op how are you going to be able to go through 30k books to determine which are valuable? Going through that many books to try to determine what is worth keeping is a monumental task. Unless you are very knowlegeable about rare books, you will never be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. It is very rare to find a valuable book. Old books rarely have value.

Your ils don't realize that this is no favor.

OP here. Hopefully my father-in-law will leave a note listing all the valuable titles. In the past, he has pointed out a few books to us to let us know those are valuable.

Maybe I should gift my in-laws that "Swedish death cleaning" book (forgot the exact title), but the title is so offensive.

This is a pipe dream. I seriously doubt that he actually knows the value of the books. I'm willing to bet their library is filled with paperbacks from the 60s.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I collect certain 70 year old books by certain authors simply because I like reading them, would never think to give them to my children. They wouldn't be interested. But the thing is, at that age many of the books I've seen are badly mildewed. They wouldn't be fit to bring into a home. If your in-laws are not storing the books properly, they may be only fit for the dumpster.

Great point. Books deteriorate easily. If your ils don't know what they're doing, they're giving a gift of heavy trash.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This came across my FB feed this morning and it made me think of OP:

Hehe, that is funny. my in-laws are not hoarders. Their house is very neat and clutter free, yes they have a lot of books, but nothing like the hoarder you are picturing.

Ha. BTDT. My parents "bequeathed" me three storage units full of valuable things like all their phone bills from the 1980s.

OMG - my in-laws have an entire freestanding garage that's packed to the rafters. We'll have to hire a bulldozer and dumpster. Luckily, DH is on board with this plan.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Inheritance? What?

+1