Sell Your Books When You're Dead

How you can keep collecting and keep from being a burden

You don’t have to be a rare-book dealer very long before you’ll hear a collector lament that they need to sell their books before they die. Better booksellers than I probably hear that and start thinking, “What can I buy?” I always think, “You are about to make a mistake you’ll regret, maybe for the rest of your life.”

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Three dozen items that just posted to my website, Downtown Brown Books. Highlights include the performance artist Laurie Anderson’s 1970 comic book, two inscribed installments from Isaac Asimov’s Annotated series, several lettered small-press books, an inscribed Richard Feynman first edition, a substantial Robert Frost typescript, and so on.

People don’t actually say that they need to sell their books before they die. Selling and dying are concepts collectors find too painful to contemplate. We use euphemisms like I need to do something with my books before I’m gone. Or the more jaded among us might offer I have to do something before my wife/husband/kids sell my books for two dollars a piece at a garage sale.¹

Next comes the explanation: I don’t want the books to be a burden.

If you are having these thoughts or plan to in the future, rest assured that garage sales where valuable books are sold for a few bucks each rarely happen.²

What often happens is much worse.

Your books are unlikely to be sold for pennies on the dollar because while collectors think they rarely talk about their books at family gatherings, our relatives think that we talk about little else. Bibliophiles, of course, only want to talk about books so any time we make conversation about, say, our recent jury service instead, we feel like we are showing admirable restraint.

The glazed-eye look we’ve all seen on our in-laws’ faces mask the fact that our dear relatives are actually listening to what we say about books some of the time. They’ve likely picked up the term first edition and the idea that first editions are VERY VALUABLE.

After a collector dies, heirs seldom dump books. Far more often, heirs worry and fret for months and even years about what the collector would want them to do. I’ve seen families paralyzed by book collections, unable to relocate or downsize from houses that are now too big. They spend endless hours looking up books on the Internet for fear of selling expensive books for too little and imagining the screams of their collector from beyond the grave. In extreme cases, collections can incite family feuds, sometimes over money but sometimes over the dignity and honor of the collectors.

A few years ago, I helped run an estate sale for a beloved aunt and uncle. They collected a particular kind of glass dinnerware in depth. In retirement, they crisscrossed the country visiting antiques malls, acquiring hundreds of items that included rare production pieces and unreleased factory trials. It was a remarkable collection, one of the best of its kind.

Ahead of the planned sale, family and friends spent weeks organizing and pricing everything. We invited glassware dealers and promoted the event everywhere we could think of.

At the beginning, a few dealers and collectors bought a handful of the rarest glass pieces. On the second day, we didn’t sell a single plate, serving bowl, or tumbler, even at 50% off. The glass pattern my aunt and uncle were passionate about, which was popular enough to merit a price guide in the 1980s, is very out of fashion today.

Some members of the family couldn’t accept this. They felt that we hadn’t worked hard enough to find the right buyers. I also think that they felt that our failure to sell the bulk of the collection meant that my aunt and uncle’s hobby, which was a big part of their life together, was a failure. Collections are often judged by how profitable they are in the end.

I think that’s the wrong measure. Hobbies aren’t typically profitable, nor are they expected to be. The football fan who attends a game each year and pays for pricey TV sports packages their whole life isn’t expected to leave any prized relics behind. Nor are people who travel or garden or bird watch. Book collecting, like any other pastime, shouldn’t be judged at all.

My aunt and uncle’s glass collection was a tremendous success because they loved the hunt, they loved displaying their finds, and they loved bringing it out for dinner parties. It would have been a real shame if they had given up collecting because they didn’t want to burden us. In hindsight, I do wish they had been clearer about what they wanted us to do with it.

Just as many people retire from working and find themselves out of sorts with not much to do, collectors who deliberately stop collecting can find a hole in their life that’s hard to fill. That’s why my initial reaction when people tell me they are going to start selling their books is to ask if they are sure there isn’t another way.

The problem we faced at my aunt and uncle’s estate sale was that few others shared their particular passion. On the third day, with the vast majority of the glass dishes still sitting on shelves, I suggested that we make it all free. This was practical because we needed to empty the house, and glassware is hard to move, being even heavier and more fragile than old books.³

Some family members were unhappy about giving the collection away, and they left. The rest of us, who had been charged with clearing the house, proceeded with the plan. The crowd that comes on the last day of an estate sale often can’t afford much. They were thrilled to get nice dinnerware, even if it was out of fashion. At the end of the day, all the glass was gone, and we felt good about the experience.

But it caused a rift in the family that took too long to mend.

This may seem like a cautionary tale with a moral that you should sell your collection before you’re gone. It isn’t.

Book collecting, more than many hobbies, does offer the possibility of a financial return, and your family is willing to make a reasonable effort to find homes for your books. It’s what we do for each other. Your job as a collector is to make sure the process is not a burden, and you can do that with a bit of advance preparation.

Before anything else, if you haven’t already done so, make a will. I’m always surprised by how many people don’t do any estate planning. Hardly anyone enjoys contemplating their mortality, but it’s much easier to do when you are healthy and the prospect of dying seems far off. If you don’t, your heirs will be stuck navigating the complex legal system governing inheritance and ultimately a government official (typically a judge) will decide what happens.⁴

When you’ve finished your will, write up a short list of instructions for what your family should do with your books.

• Which dealers, auction houses, and fellow collectors should your heirs call?

• What should they do with everything that is left?

• And last, and most important, if your loved ones follow your instructions you need to absolve them of any guilty feelings that they didn’t do enough.

These steps probably won’t get your heirs the biggest return on your investment. Only you, who know the books best, can do that. Your family members don’t understand how to describe condition or how to determine points of issue or how to know which dealers they can rely upon. It is unreasonable and unfair for you to place the burden of figuring it all out on them.

Some collectors who worry that their first editions will be sold too cheaply hope to alert their heirs to the value of the books by writing a price inside. Penciling $12,000 on the endpaper of a $1,200 book doesn’t help anyone.⁵ Your heirs won’t know who to trust, you or the bookseller trying to buy the book for $500.

It’s important to keep in mind that the people you suggest be called to buy your books might not want them, and they almost certainly won’t want all of them. That’s why it’s essential to include instructions for what to do with what’s left.⁶

If thinking about all all those strangers manhandling your prize collection makes you sick to your stomach—more so than the idea of giving up collecting entirely—then sell the books yourself. When you’re through, take up bird watching or playing World of Warcraft, hobbies that don’t leave much behind. The rest of us will buy your books and keep on collecting.

—Scott Brown

Here’s the list of instructions I’ve put with my will:

What to Do with the Books If I Die Unexpectedly

1. Call a Portland, Oregon, ABAA dealer. The ABAA website has a member search if you can’t think of someone to call. Ask the dealer if they can arrange for an auction house to take material on consignment (the auction house should give the referring dealer a commission). If the dealer offers and the terms are agreeable to you, feel free to let them take books on consignment with the expectation that the payout will be larger but slower, probably spread out over years.

   [NB: Since I am a bookseller, I know all the ABAA dealers in Portland; collectors may be better served by listing a few specific dealers, preferably people you buy from and who are younger than you are].

2. Whatever the auction house or dealer doesn’t want can be sold by sealed bid. Ask the ABAA dealer you are working with to arrange it in exchange for 20% of the sale price. If they want to do extra work, they can do it by bookcase/fixture. Otherwise one bid for everything is fine. Alternatively, engage a local estate auctioneer.

3. Once the books are gone, fixtures can be sold by putting a price on them or taking bids.

4. Don’t worry about whether you are getting the best price - if you do the above, it will be an adequate result. Thank you so much for doing this for me.

1. A collector literally said that to me last week.

2. How often have you purchased books for your collection from a single estate sale filled with good books? In my case, none, although I have gotten lucky for my shop a few times. You are far more likely to find a single good item at an estate sale than a major collection.

3. We could’ve donated the unsold pieces to a thrift store, but who knows what would have happened to them then. And to do that, we still would have had to pack everything up and move it.

4. When I co-owned Eureka Books, in Eureka, California, I once bought books from an estate that was settled by a judge. The collector, a woman who mostly bought modern first editions with a budget of $100, died without a will. Her distant relatives who stood to inherit couldn’t agree on how to divide the estate. After a year, the probate judge turned over the house and all its contents to the coroner. In Humboldt County, the coroner is responsible for liquidating the estates of people who die without wills; it’s a task the office isn’t well suited for and it’s a temptation that can easily lead to allegations of corruption. When I went to buy books, they were piled up in the corridor leading to the autopsy rooms, mostly stacked on the fiberglass gurneys they put dead bodies on. It was a good book buy for the shop, and also the oddest place I’ve ever bought books.

5. I also encountered this last week.

6. Here in Portland, if you don’t have a garage sale, “what’s left” usually ends up at Powell’s City of Books. Some cities also have large used bookstores that will buy big collections. Another alternative is one of the big companies that deal with collectible books, like Wonder Book and Schwabe Books (a.k.a. Books from California). They won’t pay much, but if the books are good enough, they’ll take everything.