> I opened a few of them and found out why. They sucked.
It could be worse - they could be fascinating, but entirely irrelevant to the modern world view.
My dad had a cache of books from a friend of his - that was collected from the pre-independence era for India from 1920s to 1945.
The world in those books were strange - the era looks like nothing like the world from my text books.
The "Great war" had just passed ("between cousins"), there was wistful memories of the Russian empire, of china being conquered by the japanese.
Oil empires in Burma (Burmah-Shell), political deals with the Kings of Siam, health of Austro-Hungarian royal inbreeding.
The shades of gray in which Belgian kings and Cecil Rhodes got painted as conquerors ,liberators and genocidal maniacs in one go.
All the important intellectuals are German (Kant, Hegel ...) or French. The world "lingua franca" was used to describe what English stands for today.
America was busted and fallen down, the economy under Hoover (who was called an "engineer, digging deeper into pockets"). They had poor quality cotton (remember, Indian British books - the Deccan plateau had Cotton too & the empire had Daka muslin) and a "department of war".
Is from such an amazing period of time, after fax machines, aero planes and Einstein, but before anti-biotics and nukes.
But other than as a curiosity, the whole collection has been obsoleted by the 2nd half of the century.