LIBRARY DUPLICATE SALES

[David Klappholz <david@gauss.eecs.stevens-tech.edu>]

Last week a member of this group, a librarian if I remember correctly,
voiced his/her opinion that duplicate sales, even of material within
a library's apparent field of specialization, aren't such a bad thing.

Let me, as a collector, tell you what's so bad about them.

Last week I had a long conversation with an elderly (80ish) collector
friend who has been planning, for years, to donate his collection, worth,
conservatively, 100K to a university which recently announced a duplicates
sale.  This collector had obtained a copy of the sale list and had
concluded that the library, which specializes in American history
might not be the place to donate his collection -- they were selling a
Washington letter, and the collector feels that Washington letters
are relevant to American history.  

While I am only in my 50's, I have already been thinking about donating
my own collection, a focussed scholarly collection and worth a pretty
penny on the market, to a rare book department.  I am not wealthy;  I have
done without other luxuries to put my collection together;  my collection,

focussed as it is, would be useful to scholars;  distibuted after a sale
it would lose all value to scholars;  I now appear to have a choice
between leaving my collection to my family, to be sold at auction or
otherwwise, or to leave my collection to an institution which may have
no compunctions about dispersing it for its own financial good.

What would you do under these circumstances?

David Klappholz