I'm picturing here a gray-haired man, myself maybe, sitting in his favorite brown leather chair, facing his personal library and suddenly saying, "Holy S! What am I going to do with all these books when I move?" (a euphemism for death or displacement).

My books came in one by one but I always hoped they'll go out in a Big Bang – all at once. Appreciated. Given new homes. I'd always assumed I'd "call the bookman," negotiate a price for all, and watch him cart them away. What a relief that would be. But what a fairy tale, it turns out. The bookman who buys regular books doesn't make house calls anymore.

Meanwhile, if you live in a fine, big home, your walls flocked with Picassos, your boudoirs crammed with armoires, and your "den" shelves bulged with autographed Shakespeares, you can skip reading this column. When you grow old and gray and forced to downsize, the antiquities traders will line the moat waiting to kiss your hand, lay their cloaks across your puddles, and make a new church out of your fine old things.

The rest of us? The basic choices are: throw them away, give them away, or sell them. Trashing is the simplest choice, but profane. Books still provoke reverence in this world.

(Paperbacks, however, can be recycled in many communities, including Philadelphia – but not hardbacks).

Giving them away, unfortunately, depends on the cooperation of others. And their willingness to take your books, for the most part, comes down to money, even when given to charities. Yes, it's possible to donate books to schools, prisons and literacy-deprived countries, but they're choosy about what they want. Indeed, most charities are because they resell donations, using the money to support their own missions.

In an ideal (for you) world, a charity would come to your house, box all your books, remove them, sell them ... and thrive because of your generosity. In the real world: you have no idea how many used books there are in America. This country is teeming with them. Even the most well-organized charities are barely able to keep up with the incoming tide, especially since the pandemic. Choices must be made. Only those books that thrift store managers deem resalable get accepted. Nobody wants moribund stock. ("Frommer's Travel Guide to Bermuda 1977," e.g.) Even Chestnut Hill Free Library's Hilltop Books shelves just a portion of the many books given to it.

Most of the big resellers of used items accept nearly everything they're given, in order to keep the flow coming. Many of them, even if they are for-profit corporations, adopt "green" names (implying environment-friendly recycling) and promise to donate a percentage of their profits to charitable foundations. For example, GreenDrop advertises that some of its proceeds will go to the Military Order of the Purple Heart, the American Red Cross, and National Federation of the Blind, among others. Sometimes they say they "partner with" those organizations.

According to my friend and bookselling colleague, Eugene Okamoto (former co-owner of Harvest Books, one of the largest East Coast bookselling businesses ever), this is what happens to books after they've been donated to GreenDrop: At the warehouse, the books are gone through by a specialist who pulls any books that seem rare or valuable. Someone else tosses whatever is in bad condition. Anything that's just a "book book" (Eugene's useful term for an average used book) lands in an industrial-sized “Gaylord Box." These units are sold like proverbial widgets. For example, he said, GreenDrop sells a 1,000 pound Gaylord to the huge internet bookseller Better World Books for about $90. Books by the pound! And this outfit sells many thousand pounds of books every day. They are for-profit, but contribute to literacy programs in underdeveloped nations.

And thus, the cycle: A paperback I remember buying at Borders in Chestnut Hill, Denis Johnson's "The Name of the World" (2000), for about $10, given to GreenDrop, appears today online for $2 (plus shipping), or gets picked from the shelves at Hilltop Books for about $3 (no shipping, of course). I also still have the hardback first edition of this book, with dust jacket, in fine condition, for which I paid Borders' $22, brand new. On the internet this afternoon I noted that there are 298 copies of this first edition for sale. Someone is asking $65 for their copy. But many others – same book, same condition – are asking $9.01.

Hmmmm. That's like those old grade school arithmetic challenges: Two trains leave their stations from different distances at different rates of speed ... How much should "the bookman" pay me for my Denis Johnson books ... if I decide to sell them?

If he comes?

[Continued next week.]

Hugh Gilmore has been a lifelong book collector and the proprietor of Gilmore's Old & Rare Books for thirty years. His antiquarian bookshop stood on Chestnut Hill Avenue – across the street from where Hilltop Books stands now.