Culling Old Textbooks

What does one do with old college textbooks? Give them permanent residence on a bottom shelf? Throw them away? (Toss out a BOOK??) Mine are so old that charitable collections don't want 'em--although how out of date can calculus be? There are a few I want to keep as references, but am not sure what to do with the rest. Looking for ideas--what have YOU done with your old textbooks?

(I know, I know--I should have sold them back to the bookstore immediately after completing each course!)

First see if someone can use the content--do you know any precocious 13-year-old's or homeschooling folks who might enjoy them? Freecycle?

If not, see if someone can use the bones--do you know any artists or interior designers who could evaluate them for creating something new? Depending on the decorative and structural qualities of the books, they might be useful for doing "altered book" projects, creating "fake books" for storing bits and pieces, or creating the side tables (stacks of books with glass on top) that are somewhat trendy right now.

I've seen some restaurants have old books on the walls or ceilings as decor.

You might be able to donate some of them to schools overseas...

I find extra textbooks to be a huge burden. I teach, and the number of free desk copies cluttering up my shared office is disturbing.

Yeah, I'd hoped to send my old college texts in a collection to Africa, but apparently they were too old to warrant the freight cost... (Biology texts, I can see but calculus??) Too bad--when I worked for a quasi-governmental agency, we used to receive the most charmingly formal letters from African students requesting our large-lake (coldwater!) publications. Apparently the pubs we sent were appreciated, because requests increased in number.

>5 margd: Have you checked Books for Africa? I don't know what their guidelines say about the types of books they want.

Hey, it's only 5 years later, but why not?! I once purchased a few books from a Friends of the Library book sale that had been cut using a band-saw into shapes -- the outline of a sitting cat, the outline of a Scottie dog, half of a butterfly (so that opened it made the whole butterfly), a house shape. These are books they couldn't sell at "a whole bag for a buck" price, such as old textbooks and reader's digest condensed editions. So they cut them like this and sold them for $7 apiece (!) for people to make unique collage scrapbooks out of.

At the presentation I saw, we saw examples of a cat scrapbook in the cat outline, a family "cookbook" in the house outline, etc. One used a math textbook to show how "smart" her cat was. Really creative stuff.

All it takes is a band-saw, and remembering to leave enough of the spine intact to hold the thing together. You can also remove (and recycle) individual pages because adding collage/photos etc. will make the whole thing thicker.

I've had better luck selling books to my classmates rather than back to the bookstore, where I'm lucky to get $5 for a book I'd purchased for $90 and then they turn around and sell the same one for $85.  I called their bluff, once.  Bought a book for pennies and "sold it back" to them for the cost of a Subway sandwich.  There's one book that has me morally offended, so I scribbled a note in it, and I'm currently wrestling with Amazon to sell it.  The whole thing makes me ranty.

I have been making them into book boxes, such as this one I made a while back.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/30223633@N05/4944850363/in/set-72157623638179533