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Ask HN: What should you do with a large collection of math books

13 points by waivej ↗ HN
How you would help a retired math professor that has a collection of books gathered over a lifetime? They are all math/physics related and many were passed along from other colleagues. Their hope is to pass them along in the same way. They cover three walls of a small office.

He mentioned that pre-covid, he would have left them in boxes outside the office for a few semesters and pass along the rest. Also that students that would send them back to their home countries to setup small libraries. A book dealer helped catalog them but said they were domain specific and hard to sell locally.

15 comments

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goy
If you can't sell them, give them away.
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eimrine
I think the best thing you can do with English books, no matter what discipline, is to let them travel abroad. I'm Ukrainian and all the science books I can buy have shitty translations. I once bought 20 used books from Amazon and spent $20 on the books, $70 on Amazon shipping, and $110 on air shipping to Ukraine. I don't know how to get English books from abroad cheaper, but at least it was worth it.
addaon
Given the situation in Ukraine right now, this might be a bad time to ask…

But I bet if you were to post the address of a local library here (with their permission) you might get quite a few folks willing to pay shipping to send some gifts over.

eimrine
I live in a small town and the only library we have is school one. Sometimes I visit bigger town but I have not used it even once, most the books I have read is pdf, some of that was bought and some was not. I will try library way next time I have time.

If talking about sending these to me not to library, I do not want anybody to pay for that, also I can pay in crypto or card for some specific books I appreciate and for post inside US. My preferred fields are cryptography, probability theory / statistics, game theory, and anything about old / obsoleted programming langs: Cobol, Fortran, Perl, also compiler design. Moderately desired is anything about electronic design and signal processing. Absolutely super desired is Turing Omnibus, GEB, TAPL and anything about Lisp.

marcescence
I would be willing to buy a significant chunk of them at least. If you're interested, please email me at lampspites@proton.me.
epilys
In my electrical and computer engineering university, I volunteered at the department's library. Retiring professors were our biggest source of books (there was no allocated budget, so we could not buy new stock and relied on donations).

When we did the weeding to accept only the useful stuff, we separated the "rejects" into a request-only section in the basement and the rest we left outside in the hallway for free giveaway.

All was gone incredibly fast and we didn't have to handle anything else. Curious minds and free books pair together very well.

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freedude
You have plenty of great suggestions below.

Another would be to contact local homeschooling groups and see if there is any interest. In groups that emphasize Classical education it is common for those gifted in mathematics and sciences to not only thrive but excel and they might welcome the advanced content of some of these.

toomuchtodo
The Internet Archive will accept them. They will be scanned and provided to the world for free as part of their library collection. If you’re in the US, it will be very inexpensive to ship them via media mail.

https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat...

https://youtu.be/RV_ALlJGU_c