garbage – Page 2 – Things I find in the garbage

The book tossers pt.1

February 11, 2023February 11, 2023 garbagefinds24 Comments

If not for this spot I’d barely have any finds in 2023. Thankfully (for me at least), these guys just keep curbing recycling bins full of books on a near weekly basis. This has been a near constant phenomenon for about six months now, though it happened occasionally even before that – I first stopped here for a big pile of trash way back in 2021.

It’s funny, because from the street there’s no indication whatsoever that this blue bin would be filled with anything but the usual tin cans and whatnot. I myself wouldn’t ever have stopped for it, if not for the fact that I found cool stuff here previously.

Sometimes, trash picking can feel kind of magical.

This is a decent sized recycling bin so the books are piling up in my garage. These are just the ones I want to research more, or feel the need to sequester for now. Others go straight to the yard sale bin, or occasionally back to the curb.

A lot of the books in this picture are from sets, so I have to figure out if I have a complete set, keeping in mind that another load of books comes nearly ever week and thus a currently incomplete set might become complete with time. I just recently completed a thirty book set of Encyclopedia Britannicas from the early 1900s for instance – I found the first 27 months ago, and then another two and the final book more recently.

That might actually be a nice score. I know the market got flooded with encyclopedias and a lot of them are pretty much worthless, but the old Britannica sets do quite well.

Anyways, I figured that today I’d show you a few of my favourite individual books from this haul, all of which I found relatively recently.

I’ve found several old books about Montreal, which are always fun and easy to sell due to local interest. This one was written by a guy named N. M. Hinshelwood and was published in 1903. It seems to be hard to find original copies – most of the ones I see in my research are reprints or those “print on demand” books that are becoming more common. The only original from that list of 36 I linked to above is priced at about 50 USD, and there’s one other on eBay for about 75$, though there’s no sold prices that indicate whether or not those are realistic prices. You can see some pages that relate to our current season below.

Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. I figured this “Complete Book of Fortune” was a good find right away, and indeed it seems to sell for 100-200$. It was published around 1935 (no date, but includes a “birthday calendar” for 1936) by Associated Newspapers Ltd. At 640 pages, it is certainly very complete and discusses topics ranging from palmistry to the “science” of phrenology. There’s a few extra pics below, and some more in that link.

Published in 1999, this is one of the newer books from this collection. The cover was unassuming, but it looked nicely made so I did some research and discovered it was a gem. It’s one (signed) copy of 175 from the regular edition of Inishbream by Theresa Kishkan. The key factor is probably that it was published by Barbarian Press, a “fine press publisher” based in Mission, BC, and features fancy paper (my simplified version of what’s described on the second picture, lol) and woodblock prints. It sold pretty quickly on eBay for 700$. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for books by this publisher going forward.

Finally, you all seemed to like my late 1700s almanacs, so I assume you’ll like this liturgical book from 1675.

It’s written in Latin (I think), so you can kind of make out some words. The content seems to relate to the Roman Ritual, but I don’t know much about that. I’m hoping you guys can help me out with this one. I don’t know much about value yet, besides finding that other liturgical works from this time have sold for between a few hundred and several hundred dollars.

This is one of the oldest books I’ve found. Just a bit older was this one from 1610, though it was in worse condition. This one is in pretty good shape considering it’s nearly 350 years old!

These book tossers are truly absurd. I hope for my sake (both from an entertainment, as well as financial perspective) that they continue tossing out great, easily flipped, and often antique books for a while yet. Either way, I definitely have more blog-worthy stuff from this spot to share here in the future.

Links

1. My eBay listings, Sign up for eBay (Canada, US), Search for something you want / research something you have (Canada, US) – FYI these are Ebay Partner Network links, so I make a few bucks if you sign up for an account or buy something after getting to eBay using these links
2. Facebook page
3. Follow @garbagefinds and @garbagefindssells (selling account, operated by someone else) on Instagram
4. Email: thingsifindinthegarbage@gmail.com – note that I can’t fulfill most requests for items, many are already gone by the time they are posted here.

Meet the parents

January 15, 2023January 15, 2023 garbagefinds24 Comments

Happy new year everyone! (I’m really stretching the time limits for saying that, but it’s my first post of 2023 so I figure it’s ok). Here’s hoping for some fresh starts, new beginnings, etc. The last couple of years haven’t been especially good for trash, or anything else for that matter, but I’ve got a feeling that 2023 will be better. If nothing else, after two down years for trash I think I’m due for some positive reversion to the mean.

My notable 2023 finds thus far have mostly been limited to that one house that keeps putting loads of cool old books in their recycling bin on a near weekly basis. January isn’t the best month for picking, especially with the snow and other blah weather, but that one spot has kept things interesting. Maybe I’ll post more about that soon. Another good spot produced a huge load of low-quality weed and vape paraphernalia, a lot of it brand-new in its packaging. I guess someone gave up on some Alibaba product they were trying to hustle. If I’m in a good mood, maybe I can document that with a video or something, but don’t count on it. Most of it is the kind of crap that should never have been produced to begin with, but it’ll definitely make me a bit of money.

Today, I figured I’d share some pics from the past that I never got around to posting.

This spot was notable because I remember stopping here a few times in the summer, and finding some interesting stuff. Then, one day, a grumpy middle aged lady saw me and got angry and shooed me away.

That was a shame, because I found some neat stuff there. Perhaps the best find was a plain manila that contained two old almanacs from the 1700s. They’re not super valuable based on my research (around 100$ for the one with the cover?), but it’s always cool to find something that old. I think I sold the one missing the cover on Instagram, and the other I still have. For now, it’s part of my collection of interesting found junk.

So several months pass. I skip out on a few piles after that person confronted me, but there was a long stretch where there was nothing for me to regret not looking through. Then, I spotted another pile there in the winter, and decide to give it another try because so much time had passed. Just so happens that another person came out to greet me… but this time it was a woman maybe in her 60s-70s who was quite nice, who I’m guessing was the grumpy one’s mom. She ended up helping me look through her own trash to find the good stuff she had tossed, and also offered me some things from inside the house. She was moving, and seemed thankful that someone was helping her with these objects that she apparently had no clue how to, or no energy to deal with.

A lot of the best finds were in those trash bags, like that little solid silver creamer, the ceramic bowl which was labelled as being from the 1800s on the bottom, that cute miniature cottage figurine which also looks to be quite old, etc.

There was plenty of other quality junk, including lots of other old copper stuff, but I never got around to taking pictures of it. Nothing mind blowing anyways, just nice things that didn’t deserve to be trashed.

Changes pt.2

November 27, 2022November 27, 2022 garbagefinds22 Comments

My garage, after a lot of purging and reorganizing in preparation for my friend’s van going in

Early in the summer, I heard about a new artist space opening up in Outremont. The idea excited me, because for a while I’d been thinking that my “garbage life” was far too isolating. More often than not, I pick alone, I sort alone (in this garage), I write alone, I research alone, and I sell alone.

My theory was that, by splitting a space with other people, artists in particular, I’d feel a little less alone, maybe make some new friends, benefit from some new connections, etc. And I did enjoy being there, for a bit. But eventually, reality set in: for all that craving for social interaction, for a feeling of community, and so on, I also really wanted to work less hard. With rent at 320$ a month, I realized I had to hustle 320$ a month harder (or close to 3840$ a year) to just to survive.

I’ve talked about burnout here a lot, maybe you’re sick of hearing about it. But I found a way to make trash picking into a lot of work. Finding the trash (10-15 hours a week) is usually kind of fun, when I’m not getting yelled at by idiots. But when I do get a big haul of stuff, I suddenly have a carload of stuff to deal with. So I have to empty the car / drop off all this junk at the storage, and organize it again. The more interesting stuff gets sequestered together (by the spot where I found it) for future blog photos, and the less interesting stuff goes straight to the yard sale bin, or a shelf if it’s something I want to research a bit more. When I actually get around to taking these blog photos, that’s pretty time consuming, and I don’t really get paid for it. And then there’s the stuff that’s worth nothing or close to it, that I devote energy to redistributing anyways because I hate waste, the actual garbage I have to take out (inevitably I take things I shouldn’t, especially when I throw whole bags in the car), and the bins and bins full of yard sale stuff that I have to keep from overflowing and making my space a disaster zone. And then, there’s the blog writing, photo editing, social media, and etc. Blogging + photography, in the past sometimes took around 15-20 hours a week alone back when I was really pumping them out, and doing these monster posts with crazy amounts of pictures.

I can empathize with poor Newman here, because the garbage never stops, and all the work above is a job in itself, in my opinion. But maybe you noticed that, despite all those tasks, I haven’t actually made any money yet. Yard sales are more fun than work, especially now that I pay a friend to help me (I can’t believe I used to do them all by myself), but they’re still work (often close to 10 hours) and a lot of my money is made on eBay. That’s where my more valuable finds go, but it can take minutes or hours to figure out what something is worth (not to mention the items where no matter how much I “do my own research,” I’m not qualified, or just don’t feel qualified enough to make a final evaluation). Listing itself can take 5-30 minutes depending on the complexity of the item (I’d say the average is like 10-12 minutes, between taking the pictures and writing the description, adding shipping costs, etc). Until it sells, you have to store it somewhere, and then when it does sell, you have to put it in a box and ship it out. Most of the time the transaction goes off without a hitch, but once in a while something goes wrong and you have to do something. And all the while, “the garbage never stops,” so there’s always some new thing to deal with / worry about.

Me looking haggard at the “new space,” surrounded by years-old crap, and some fresh finds as well

So anyways, short story long, I get this new coworking space. I bring a bunch of my junk from the old space, but then I realize there’s not really all that much that I actually wanted to bring. And a lot of the stuff I did bring, were finds from literally 2-3 years ago, that I hadn’t actually gotten around to doing anything with beyond many rounds of sorting (they were often “complicated finds,” or things that needed a lot of research and attention).

And why was I still hauling around such old finds? Probably because there was no way for one person to stay on top of this much stuff. Then I think of the 320$ a month price tag and freak out a little, because it means that not only am I going to have to keep hustling my ass off just to make rent, I’m actually going to have to hustle harder.

So, that didn’t work out (on top of those issues, the space was also on the 2nd floor which wasn’t really very convenient… I was really looking through rose-coloured glasses when I made the initial decision). Thankfully I hadn’t had to sign a lease, and had kept control of the garage (I tried renting some of that space to friends for winter vehicle storage, to save a bit of cash, but my landlord apparently doesn’t want me doing that for some cockamamie reason, so that’s off now too… a whole other story though not a very exciting one).

And now I’m back to square one, where I spend way too much time alone, operate out of a fortress of solitude where the rent has recently increased from 200$ a month to 250$, and wish I was part of something bigger. However, I did learn one thing from this experience – that I don’t want to devote so much of my life to work, at least not in the way I have been.

I think that’s enough words for now, next time maybe I’ll get into my ideas for how to proceed going forward, in a way that’s more fulfilling and less work intensive.

Below is a photo dump of some stuff I found pre-pandemic, but never got around to sharing here.

(On a side note, some of my economic anxiety also has to do with the fact that since a spectacular 2020, the garbage has sucked much more often than not. Finds have been a bit better lately, but I’m still not finding much in the way of gold, and neighbourhoods that were once cash cows have been mostly wastelands for some time now. So, these expenses that might not have stressed me out previously, are stressing me out now… but either way, the work/life balance was an issue I was going to have to deal with regardless).