Is there anyone who actually welcomes large quantities of used books?

What’s your preferred way to dispose of a whole lot of books?

I have to move hundreds, if not thousands, out the door.

I’m not going to carry them all outside in order to sell twenty at a yard sale, nor can I box them all and tote them to the library. The library will not want dozens of boxes of old fiction and nonfiction paperbacks and literary hardcovers (many of them heavily annotated), old textbooks, or outdated reference works.

I couldn’t bear to just toss them all in a Dumpster.

I’m not going to live long enough to list and sell them all on Amazon Marketplace, where they can probably all be had already for .01 plus shipping, whereas I would wind up losing money on every sale. (Learned that lesson already.)

Some of them are old and possibly valuable. But I can’t keep them all.

And I can’t pack and store them or move them all either.

It would take forever to try to find the “right home” for each one or even for scores at a time.

Most of them are inaccessible enough right now that I couldn’t even invite people over and say “Take your pick. Help yourself.” Impossible. (And I would cry a lot.)

I know some places would take donations of contemporary fiction, and I have plenty of that, but who wants the letters of Nabokov or the novels of Thomas Hardy or several translations of Plato’s Republic?

Unfortunately I don’t even have a working fireplace at the moment.

How does one do this? How do you do it?