What Should I Do With Hundreds of TV Guides?

My Mom is moving to a smaller place close to the beach… so I am cleaning out my garage to give her some storage space. And I have come to the painful realization that it’s time to get rid of my 100s of  TV GUIDES. I don’t have the time or patience to scan each cover and sell’em individually on eBay… so I am coming to you, my loyal readers, for suggestions on what to do with them.  Is there a library I could donate them to, perhaps?  And while you’re at it, have you got any ideas on what I should do with:

  • 600 copies of BEYOND THE BEYOND?
  • 100s of publicity and set photos from movie & TV press kits? (the kits themselves are long gone)
  • A few hundred issues of STARLOG magazine?

I’ve got four weeks until she moves her stuff into my garage…

18 thoughts on “What Should I Do With Hundreds of TV Guides?”

  1. I’m pretty sure there are companies out there that will ebay your stuff for a commission. I don’t know which are legit or not.
    But you’ll probably have to put them on craig’s list or toss them out.

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  2. TV Guides: Assuming you have a reasonably complete collection, list the whole collection on E-bay, going from X date to Y date.
    Photos: Trash. Unless you’re willing to collect them all in some manner, or e-bay them with a listing of who is in the photos. Some of them might be rare, I suppose.
    Beyond the Beyond: I was going to suggest selling them as signed copies for $10 each (including shipping), but I don’t know if you have that kind of time.

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  3. You might check with the Museum of the Moving Image in NYC (http://www.movingimage.us) and see if they have any use for the photo collection. They archive a lot of stuff like that — peripheral materials surrounding the TV and film industries — and might be grateful to take the collection off your hands.
    Also, TV Guide is reputed to make great kindling.

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  4. Put them into boxes and mail them to your faithful cousin Anea who will sell them on ebay for you 🙂
    either that or do the ebay route yourself as a “collection”, I am sure somebody will want them.

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  5. I always donate my old magazines to my gym. Everyone needs flat reading material there, and they won’t care how old it is. I suppose this goes for medical offices too, but the magazines go faster at my gym.

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  6. Donate the whole lot as the Lee Goldberg Collection. Small town libraries and/or museums would kill for stuff like this. In fact, The Princess Theater, an old movie theater in Winnsboro LA, my home town, has been renovated and is trying to survive as a community center/arts center/museum. Let me know if you’re interested.

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  7. The cinema and TV collection at the UCLA Research Library would probably appreciate a donation of the press kits (and possibly the TV guides).
    Or you could set up a table at the semi-monthly Comics and Science Fiction Convention held at the Shrine auditorium. With luck, you’ll be located next to a table selling POD slash fanfic and bootleg DVDs.

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  8. Contact the U of California, Berkley. They have an extensive Popular Culture collection, which includes books, magazines, movies, tv, comics, etc.

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  9. Nobody’s mentioned the last “Extreme Home Makeover” where the chairs in one TV watching room were made from bundled TV Guides?
    I had to turn around (from my computer chair — the TV is often turned to a channel I’m not watching) to actually see how they did it.
    They bound them stacked together and spine up as the actual seat portion of the chair.

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  10. The Los Angeles Public Library will gladly take my collection of TV Guides, which goes back at least 20 years (several decades’ worth were lost when my garage was flooded).

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  11. Chadwick,
    Unfortunately, the nearest Half Price Books store is in Concord…300 miles north of Los Angeles. Close to you…far from me!
    But I’ve emailed their national buyer to see if he might be interested. Thanks for the tip!
    Lee

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  12. If you are confident that Beyond the Beyond is an attractive book, give it away at signings of your other books, or at any sort of literary event. It will generate new readership for you. I gain readers by giving away lots of books. (There are some of mine that I don’t give away because I suspect they would not be helpful.)

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  13. Richard,
    I have been doing that for years… and I still have hundreds of copies left! I even gave away 100 copies at Left Coast Crime in El Paso two years ago.
    Lee

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  14. Four weeks isn’t much time. Would a mystery bookstore in Southern Cal take them for giveaways? Trade shows are always a good possibility. Western authors do well at livestock expositions.

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