literally these are books that would be pulped if not bought for 10 cents on the dollar. do rare books sometimes make it into there? yeah, if someone is careless, but that's *upstream* of what happens on sale, not *downstream*. you fundamentally are rescuing something from the fucking pulper.

to be fair I really hope that some of them, if they're in public domain, are scanned and put online somewhere, like on Archive, or in storage. google books still kept a lot of scanned ones available online on books.google.com, that's how I managed to find some Duke of Wellington related texts