Landfill, Generic Bookshops, or Us?

Most law libraries don't get thrown away because someone decided they were worthless. They get thrown away because nobody had a better option ready by the time the decision had to be made.

Why landfill happens by default, not by decision

The skip is rarely chosen. It's what happens when a valuation, a donation route, or a specialist buyer weren't sorted out before the deadline arrived — an office move, a lease ending, a closure date that doesn't move. We've written about this specifically in the context of firms closing, merging, or relocating, where the pattern is consistent: the library is dealt with last precisely because it isn't urgent right up until it's the only thing left.

There's a practical wrinkle that makes this worse than people expect: hardback binding often isn't accepted in ordinary kerbside recycling, because it isn't paper. A mixed law library — some hardback, some paperback, spanning decades — genuinely can't just go in one recycling bin the way a stack of magazines can. Sorting it properly takes real effort, and under time pressure, effort is exactly what runs out first.

Why a generic bookshop is the wrong tool for this job

A general secondhand bookshop, a charity shop, or an ISBN-based buyback service isn't a bad option in general — it's simply built for a different kind of book. Most of these systems price by looking up an ISBN against a database of ordinary trade titles.

That's a real structural mismatch for a law library specifically. A large share of practitioner texts — older statute volumes, historic law report runs, older editions of major encyclopaedias — either predate ISBNs entirely or were never catalogued in these systems the way a paperback novel would be. Feed a generic buyback tool an ISBN it doesn't recognise, and the honest outcome is either a rejection or a low, blanket "we'll take it off your hands" price that has nothing to do with whether the set is complete, current, or genuinely valuable.

Even where a bookshop does accept law books, it's unlikely to know that a complete run is worth substantially more than the same number of volumes with gaps, or that a current edition and a superseded one aren't interchangeable. That's not a criticism of general bookshops — it's simply not what they're set up to assess.

What a specialist buyer actually does differently

We don't rely on an ISBN lookup, because most of what we buy wouldn't survive one. We look at what's actually there — completeness, edition, and condition, the same three things that genuinely drive a set's value — and value it accordingly, whether it's a current run or one that's decades out of date.

We also collect directly, free of charge, so the choice isn't really "sort it properly or throw it away" — it's a photo and an enquiry, and we do the rest. That's the actual alternative to landfill: not a moral argument about waste, just a genuinely easier option that happens to exist.