Getting Rid of Some Books

Today we started the process of getting rid of a large number of our books, well over a hundred, possibly as many as two hundred. A lot of them are hardbacks.

We’d been collecting cardboard boxes for the last six months or so, all stored in the Gynnal.

We were going to sell them to We Buy Books. They are based in Rawtenstall, less than an hour’s drive from Marsden Towers. A day out with some of the money to spend. I loaded their app onto my phone and started scanning them. For the first hardback scanned, they’d give us just forty pence.

Sitting in the lounge, we quickly decided that scanning all the books would take us ages and wouldn’t raise much money. It would be a lot of hassle.

I remembered Polly saying there’s an Oxfam shop in Holmfirth that takes books. I phoned them; they said they could take a few but not over a hundred; they didn’t have the room. They suggested I try the branch on Colne Road, Huddersfield; they have a warehouse there. I phoned them up, and the gentleman I spoke to said yes, he could take all of them. He’d even come and collect them. Sounded like a much better idea.

Boxing them all up took an hour or so. We left the boxes round the wood-burning stove while we waited for the Oxfam man to come and collect them. We needed over a dozen boxes.

While he was here, he told us that many of the book-buying companies are owned by Amazon.

A few days earlier, we’d been to the tip. We asked if books could be recycled (Plan B). The man we spoke to said no; they just get thrown in a skip. Very few charity shops sell books these days, it seems. I guess we were lucky.