National Recycling Week – 8 Great Reasons to Buy Recycled Books
The UK’s annual recycling week is running from 20th to 26th September. This is a celebration of recycling with the goal of galvanising the public into recycling more of the right things, more often.
So here are eight great reasons why you should buy recycled books.
1. It’s better for the environment. Millions of trees are destroyed and millions of tonnes of CO2 are produced each year to produce new books. Furthermore it saves used books being sent to landfill.
2. It’s good to your wallet. Do you really need the latest edition whereas you could often buy an earlier edition for a fraction of the price.
3. The books are already ‘worn-in’. You won’t feel so guilty when bending the spine or popping it in your bag to read on the train or beach. We recently received a collection of Terry Pratchett books which have been very well read. And so they should be! Books are meant for reading.
4. You never know who owned them before. Inscriptions, notes in the margin, bookplates all add to the provenance, character and history of a book. A textbook with notes may help you in your own assignment! Or there may be an intriguing inscription. For example, we found a book with an inscription by the author to the people to whom the book was dedicated. So how had it ended up in a collection in Cambridge?
5. That old book smell. Used books have often spent years collecting their own unique smell. Imagine the smell of our collection of 50,000 books.
6. Find out-of-print titles. Sometimes the most battered books are the most sought after. We recently came across some books by Miles Burton, an author I had not heard of previously. The books were published in the 1940s but are now out of print and hard to find. These were swooped up very quickly.
7. Expand your reading horizons. You’ll come across authors you would not otherwise have considered, not just those on display as you walk into the high street bookshop. Our subscription packages are great for encouraging you to try new authors or genres.
8. You’ll read more. Because you can afford more books.