The University of Winnipeg has sold one of the largest collections of science fiction in the world off to a private dealer. The University couldn't afford to store the 30,000+ books any longer, so it sold them off to an American dealer for $140K, $110K less than the assessed value.
"Unfortunately, we were storing it in our off-site storage facility, which is not climate-controlled, so the collection would have been disintegrating year by year."
Leggott says most of the classic items in the collection can still be found in the university's library. "For example, the first-edition books that were there, like the Dune, the Herbert books, the Asimov, Edward Rice Burroughs – they would all be available still today in other editions."
Leggott says Curry did leave the university about 4,000 hard cover books from the collection.
(Thanks, Dan and Lloyd!)
