One of Britain's largest stocks of second-hand books ever amassed
10 comments
·September 1, 2025phendrenad2
I hope these books make their way to good homes! There are so many books that are out-of-print and, because they aren't widely known, and the author has passed away, they're very unlikely to ever be republished. Those books will become more and more rare with each passing year. This "great middle" section of books is slowly going missing.
sherr
I can imagine the smell that greets you walking round this amazing collection of books. I'd love to browse. I have a Kindle but it has had a flat battery for years now because I just love paper books too much.
pessimizer
This can't actually be one of the largest stocks of second-hand books. That's just 50 of me, and I only have a couple walls full. He's got 25 rooms, which very much sounds like 50 of me. I'm poor, I'm not special.
I wish I could get rid of them all; when I want to read one again I just pirate a scan. I've literally thought about tightly wrapping them in plastic and burying them in a concrete vault. After the original texts of all "legacy" writing have been deemed too provocative, somebody could discover them and dig them up, show their friends how they've been changed since everything went digital, and shortly afterwards get arrested as a terrorist pornographer.
dang
Those photos!
yourapostasy
I love libraries of all kinds, and wish LLM training development will drive even greater preservation and digitization efforts. I sure hope someone preserves this collection, installs a dry fire extinguisher system, and digitizes into the Internet Archive what doesn’t already exist online.
hopelite
It would be something a whole organization and public campaign would need to be built around.
We have also already traversed, unwittingly, into a post-ownership world and the IP issue would need to be dealt with since it was not dealt with to this point and the thieves have gotten away with robbery by default. Books were one of the first steps into a world where you do not own anything you buy, you merely possess it until the IP owner decides to revoke their authority for everything you think you own. I recall the ironic incident in around 2013 where Amazon without permission simply deleted people’s copies of a purchased book from their Kindles due to some IP dispute with a publisher, without even providing notice. The book … 1984, by George Orwell.
It is why in understand if people “pirate” or maybe better put, seize their rights.
Something you cannot share, trade, exchange, gift, pass down, sell, or often even move… is not something you own.
exe34
all my Amazon books were dedrm'ed and my kindle does not connect to the WiFi. I've stopped buying from Amazon since they removed the transfer via usb option.
metalman
over 1 mile of shelf, he wants 1.5mill£ for the whole estate, and he will stay on
andrewstuart
I wonder if an AI company will quietly buy and scan.
The University of Toronto has a free store and they place items departments discard into 2 areas. 1 area can be grabbed by other departments for a month - then it goes into a public swap shop area for Wednesday AM. Lots of assorted stuff but they place cubic meter boxes of all manner of books, old journals, reference books etc. In the same vein, I have seen dozens of old book stores close over the past 20 years. Truly rare books and incunabula
https://fisher.library.utoronto.ca/collections/incunabula
I think Ebay was the beginning of the end. Most books in the past ~100 years were printed in substantial press runs, and many had reprints. That meant they were not globally rare, just widely scattered. Ebay revealed their vast numbers and a level marketplace emerged. Books dealers snagged the truly rare and the vast bulk went unwanted and unread. As a Northern claim staker and mine engineer, I often passed by the Highway Bookstore, in Cobalt Ontario
https://www.highwaybooks.ca/