PLANS FOR SELLING MY LIBRARY

Bob Corbett
November 6, 2007

After 22 years of building my library and working quite obsessively to build it, I have decided to sell it. When I returned from Haiti on my first visit in 1983 I was overwhelmed with my experience there, especially the poverty I had witnessed, and I just had to know more about the country, especially why it was so poor.

I hurried over to my own university library and was shocked by the handful of books on Haiti in that library. I went to three much larger university libraries here in St. Louis, Washington University, St. Louis University and University of Missouri, St. Louis.

They had more volumes than Webster U, but still very few books, probably, at that time, no more than 30-40 books in any one with a great deal of duplication.

I started building a library of my own, and it just took over a huge portion of my life.

Now, retired for 7 years, I realize I won’t be teaching or writing about Haiti much more in my life. My work interests have turned to mopoing up work on the 40 + years of gathering data for a massive family history, and since 1999 I’ve been working significantly on the history of my own neighborhood of Dogtown in St. Louis.

Thus I’ve decided to sell the library, hopefully ensuring it gets into hands of people who will appreciate and use the books and other materials.

I would like the library to stay intact and go to one person or institution. However, I’m not too sure if that will happen or not. There has been interest shown in the entire library, but nothing has been decided yet.

My plan will be to work on detailing things about the library on this site and via this mailing list, and keep doing that until at least after the new year unless an attractive offer for the whole library would come in before that. If, however, it gets to be after the new year and there isn’t any more serious interest shown in the entire library, then I may make the decision to sell the library piece by piece, not something I really want to do.

In the meantime I will try – which I have not done yet – to be able to set a rather firm price that would be a minimum I would take for the whole. However, as I begin to detail the nature of the library on this site, I think I will soon come to know what I want to ask for the library as a whole.

There is a middle ground between me selling the WHOLE library to one person or institution, and selling it by the book. That middle ground is to separate parts of it into smaller “collections” and this I will do bit by bit on this site so people know what the pieces are.

Questions are welcomed, but I don’t yet have a price to set on the whole.

Bob Corbett

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