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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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.  [/quote]

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.[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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