House move - hobby move

The next task on my move list was to clear out the old books I’ve accumulated over the years. Back in university I played DnD 3rd edition and I probably bought every single rulebook, not to mention many 3rd party rulebooks. Even at the time many were simply read once and never used.

I also liked to buy every single Warhammer Army Book and every 40k Codex.

I also had a small collection of novels – mostly Horus Heresy.

I used to tell myself I might read them again or look at the artwork. But as nearly all of them sat in the loft of my last house for a decade, I know now that’s not going to happen.

First I selected a few books that I definitely wanted to keep. These were mostly the dedicated artwork books which I might feasibly peruse at some point.

The I downloaded the “We Buy Any Book” app. I could then use the phone to scan each book barcode and within a second it would tell me how much I could get for it if I sold it. Some books weren’t recognised or had no value, but many were worth something. I found there was not rhyme or reason to the value. Some Warhammer Army books were worth several pounds and some were worthless. It had nothing to do with age or how popular the army was at the time they were is use, as far as I can recall.

Once I’d gone through my entire collection and put those with a value into re-used house move boxes, about 2’3rds of my books were ready to be sold. I had to redistribute the books a bit as only when I went to book collection did the app tell me that no box could be over 12 or 15kg (I forget the exact limit).

I could either drop the boxes off at a collection point or have a courier collect them. The shipping was free. I went for the collection option as I had 11 boxes weighing 12kg each.

I printed off the labels and stuck them to the boxes and a few days later the courier collected them.

Collection was on 9th September and the parcels were finally fully processed and I got paid on 28th September, so it too just under three weeks. No idea if that’s their normal lead time or it took a bit longer because there were a lot of boxes.

In short I sold about 243 books and got £593.68 for them (average £2.44 per book) and it took me a few hours to do all the processing. All it cost me were 11 shipping boxes.

Times being what they are I thought some people might find this information useful.

Below is a screenshot of some typical Games Workshop book resale prices.