What to Do With Old Law Books: Sell, Donate or Recycle

Old law books are heavy, they fill a lot of shelving, and most of the people who used them now look cases up online. That leaves a lot of firms, chambers and families with a wall of law reports and no clear idea what to do with it.

There are four ways out: sell the books, donate them, send rare ones to auction, or recycle the ones that are past use. Most libraries end up using more than one, so it helps to know what each route will and won't take before you start.

Start with what is on the shelves

A law library is rarely one thing. Before choosing a route, sort what you have into rough groups, because each group goes a different way.

• Sets and runs. Law reports such as the All England Law Reports, The Law Reports and the Weekly Law Reports, and encyclopaedias such as Halsbury's Laws and Halsbury's Statutes. These are bought and sold as sets.
• Practitioner texts. The working reference books: the Common Law Library, Atkin's Court Forms, the Encyclopaedia of Forms and Precedents and specialist works. With these, the edition matters most.
• Student textbooks. Single textbooks from a law degree.
• Rare and antiquarian books. Old law books valued as books in their own right.

You do not need to count every volume to do this. A walk along the shelves with a phone camera is usually enough.

Selling

Selling is the route for sets and runs, and for practitioner texts that sit in a collection. A specialist buyer of law libraries values the books from photos or a list, buys the sets that have a resale value, and collects them.

That is what we do. You send us photos of the shelves, we come back to you with a valuation, and if you go ahead we pack the books straight from the shelves and pay the transport, anywhere in the UK. The payment goes into your bank account. Where part of a collection has little resale value, we can talk about collecting it free of charge so the shelves are still cleared.

The books we buy go back into use. We sell them on through our own shop, Law Book Sellers, and pass others to new law firms, libraries, students, colleges and charities, including in developing countries.

We buy collections and sets rather than single textbooks. A handful of student textbooks is better sold or donated on its own.

Donating

Donation suits recent practitioner texts and textbooks in good condition. Two organisations come up most often.

The International Law Book Facility is a registered charity that sends second-hand legal books to not-for-profit organisations around the world. It is selective about what it can use. It accepts practitioner texts, specialist texts and university textbooks, legal dictionaries, and encyclopaedia volumes such as individual volumes of Halsbury's Laws no more than ten years old. It does not accept law reports unless they are complete sets in bound volumes, Halsbury's Statutes, books more than ten years old unless they are the last edition of a text, or books that are torn or marked. You must contact it before sending anything, and it cannot reimburse the cost of getting the books to its store.

The Law Society library welcomes donations of specific titles that would extend its own collection. You send a list and it tells you which it can take. It cannot buy books or cover postage.

Our guide to donating law books goes through who takes what in more detail.

The gap between those rules and a typical firm library is large. Long runs of law reports, Halsbury's Statutes and older editions are exactly what the donation routes turn away, and they are what most firm and chambers libraries hold.

Auction, for rare books

If you think some of the books are rare, the Law Society's own guidance is that legal books are more likely to be valuable if they were printed before 1800. For those, an auctioneer that sells legal material is worth a call. The Law Society names Bloomsbury Auctions, Sotheby's and Bonhams as auction houses that deal with legal books.

It also draws a useful line between two kinds of valuation. An insurance valuation is the cost of replacing the books, and a sale valuation is what you could expect to get for them. Insurance valuations tend to be higher, so be clear which one you are asking for.

Recycling

Recycling is for books that really are past use: water-damaged, mouldy, or falling apart. Your council's recycling service will tell you whether it takes hardback books and how.

When a collection comes to us, the books in really poor condition are recycled with care, so you do not need to sort those out first.

Which route for which books

Getting a valuation

The quickest first step is a set of photos. Photograph each bay of shelving straight on, in good light, so the spines can be read, and tell us the town or postcode where the books are. Send them through the valuation form or on WhatsApp to 07920 748314, and we will tell you which sets we can buy.