Sorry for the long wait. It was a busy year, and after yard sale season ended I became laser-focused on organizing my various spaces.
I might remember 2023 as the “Year of the Book Hauls.” Not just the wackos who tossed a recycling bin (or two) of often antique books almost every week for several months, but also a few other fairly large book hauls, including one at that spot I literally pulled an all-nighter digging through (another memorable experience that I’ll have to expand upon at some point).
I’m happy I saved the books, and have already earned somewhere between a few and several thousand dollars selling the books, but my biggest regret this year was also how I dealt with them. A lot – we’re talking several hundred – ended up in the “yard sale bins,” but it turns out that books really don’t do well at yard sales. Sure, some people will buy some classics, but most just sat collecting dust, while I (and the friends I hire to help at my sales) got plenty of exercise trotting these heavy boxes in and out of my storage spaces. It was not dissimilar to how Sisyphus got a great workout pushing that rock up that hill over and over again.
Also a point of irritation: the space I wasted at yard sales displaying books that rarely sold, when I could have put literally anything else in the same place with better results. I think I would have made about as much money selling vintage underwear than I did selling these books… and the vintage underwear would have weighed a lot less. There were bins that barely made it to sales until the end of the year, because they (the forests) got forgotten for all the books (trees) in the way. The yard sale book strategy was simply not an effective use of space or time.
Anyways, by the end of yard sale season, I was sick of the books. Thankfully my mom and sister were willing to help me sort them. The picture above is the conclusion of a few hours of work, where we assembled 23 boxes of old/antique books – about 360 total – for a bulk sale.
Here’s a couple of the 23 boxes, just as an example. We weeded out newer books, and kept some classics that we thought had a better chance of selling at my sales (even that might have been a mistake, but oh well). Mercifully, someone off Facebook Marketplace came pretty quickly and bought them all for 400$.
Otherwise, about a month earlier I sold five boxes of incomplete sets for 100$ (the prodigious book tossers owned two complete sets of the “Source Records of the Great War”, and two incomplete sets… incredible).
Before that, I sold two boxes of Franklin Library (a company that publishes nice, leather-bound editions of classic works) books for somewhere around 300$.
So, the profit was there (this doesn’t even include the books I sold on eBay, including one that went for 700$). The only issue is that it took me almost a full yard sale season to realize that these “yard sale” books were boat anchors, and that the best way to deal with them was to unload them in bulk. Looking back, I shake my head thinking about how much effort I put into hauling these books around.
“Live and learn” is an apt expression here.
I should also include a quick mention of all the books I ended up curbing or donating. Above is just the purge pile from the day my mom and sister helped – there were many more I decided weren’t worth the effort on different days. If curbed, I always left them in places where I knew lots of people would walk past and pick through them. For donation, I left most in various book exchange boxes, the kind that you see often walking around this city.
There’s still about 300 books in my garage, but at least those are cool ones that need to be listed on eBay, or that I’ve decided I need to research further.
After all that, I was in a mood for a reset. I wanted to get my spaces in order, ideally in a way that would promote superior order going forward. Thankfully, the fall weather held up pretty nicely, affording me lots of time to organize my various spots in relative comfort. First came the Coloniale space, and the many bins of yard sale junk (some of which I hadn’t been good at keeping organized, because of the books). This bin, for example, was just a huge mound of papers that people rarely saw. Most of them were cool, but you can only have so much 1960s-1980s travel ephemera (for example). I left about half of it on the curb for other pickers to dig through.
By the end, everything was in its place. Coloniale is for yard sale stuff, and occasionally overflow. So the junk was purged, the random things that fell by the wayside (and sometimes got moldy) tossed, the hallway raked, and the things that were too fancy, or simply warranted further research were brought to the garage, aka “The Office.”
And I’ll leave it at that for now. Hopefully it doesn’t take me another three months to get to part two.
Links
1. My eBay listings. Sign up for eBay (Canada, US). Search for something you want / research something you have (Canada, US). — These are Ebay Partner Network links. If you create an account or buy something after getting to eBay from here, I get a small cut of the profit! —
2. “Things I find in the garbage” on Facebook
3. Follow @garbagefinds and @garbagefindssells. Note that someone else runs the latter.
4. Email: thingsifindinthegarbage@gmail.com. Note that I really suck at keeping up with my email.
5. Donate to the blog. It costs close to 500$ a year to maintain (no ads, domain name, storage space, etc) which ain’t cheap. Otherwise, it’s nice to get a few bucks for coffee, food, or gas!