When I was a child, I counted the books in my mother's library. It was thousands. She couldn't ever bear to purge or part with any. They stayed there, on the shelves, for the years that my father lived there alone. Gathering Dust. And now - Hurray! - they're my problem.
After his death I spent 6 months cleaning relentlessly, then burned out big-time. In that period I did manage to weed the books quite a lot, and found many that could be thrown away, donated to the high school art program for art projects, or donated to a free library at a nearby store. Now I'm back at it. The top two shelves, here, have cracked loose at one side. Although it's hard to tell in the picture, they are sloping backward, and need to be shored up.
When I cleared books off, I found a lot of them were college textbooks, literary collections, history books, and even highschool/junior high texts. Many I was able to simply throw away. However, a history or geography textbook that is sufficiently old can go out the other side of being "outdated" and become of interest again as a time capsule.
"College Geography" and "The Human Face of Changing Africa" - from the 1960s. A four-volume history of England - from the 1860s (Jeez). United States History published 1909, with a school board sticker inside. "The Essays of Elia" by Charles Lamb, which is only of interest to me because it's mentioned as an important plot point in "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" (which was SO GOOD,and it was made into a movie, too)
Anyhoo. Point is, I will give any of these away to anyone who wants them and can send me a few bucks for shipping costs. As far as shipping goes, It would probably be best to keep it to North America.
This is working! The US, Roman, and English histories are spoken for, I've had questions about The Gift of Friendship, and I'm about to start vacuuming and cleaning up books so I can pack to ship.