Dusty Attics and Faulty Memories

I haven't had any time for gaming recently between gradschool and traveling for work.  I've even had to temporarily drop out of my 1st Ed. AD&D game, which until now I'd attended for 28 straight sessions.

Despite the depressing demands on my time, I got some awesome hobby news this week: my parents found a treasure trove of some of my old gaming stuff!

My folks were organizing their attic and found some old boxes containing things from my childhood.  We knew those boxes were up there but I'd assumed it was only things from when I was really young, like old Star Wars figures and such.  Turns out, there was a respectable amount of RPG books and Ral Partha miniatures I'd brought back from college.

Attic Treasure Trove

Disregard the junk comics

Ral Partha rocked!

I swore I sold this stuff off.  I mean, the "memory" of me packing up all this stuff and sending it to Troll and Toad, or Noble Knight Games was so clear.  Of course, my collection was much, much bigger and I did sell most of it to either or both of those two businesses.  I guess I held a few boxes aside though and left them with my folks for safe keeping.  I truly don't remember that though.  It makes me wonder what other memories are inaccurate...

I've been kicking myself for a decade and a half for purging my collection.  It's a good thing to see that apparently some of the best bits got saved from the purge. 

AD&D 1st Ed Collection: Should I Sell?

The post title says it all.  I pose this question to the gaming universe: would you sell a collection of potentially useless books that nevertheless appeal to your sense of nostalgia?

So a year ago or so I got lucky and found a Rubbermaid tub of roleplaying books in my local area.  The gentleman selling just wanted to get rid of the books, or rather his wife wanted them gone, so I got the whole lot of nearly 40 books for $130.  Score!

Even better, the tub contained a few rare items (Battletech 'Mech blueprint posters).  I sold the posters along with a few titles I found lame (Palladium stuff and Dragonlance manuals) and ended up making the entire $130 back.  So essentially, all the remaining ~27 books were got for nothing: double score! The books pictured to the left, the titles I'm contemplating selling, are just a part of the collection.  Also included in the collection are the 1st Ed. Monster Manual, core books for AD&D 2nd Ed., the Blue Boxed Set of D&D, the red D&D Basic book from 1981, the D&D Companion, Masters and Immortals rulebooks (alas, no boxes or other contents of those boxes), Star Wars 2nd Ed. (WEG), GURPS 3rd Ed., some old Champions books, the Marvel Superheroes Ultimate Powers Book, and some really tore-up Robotech books.

I've pulled the 1st Ed. AD&D books off the shelves a number of times with the intent of photographing them for eBay, only to put them back.  There's just something about the orange spines, the tiny print inside, and the ink line art that tugs at my adolescent memories and makes me say "nah, I'll keep these".  I know that Legends & Lore is useless (who needs the stats for a god?).  I've looked through Oriental Adventures and rolled my eyes.  I previously owned the Dungeoneer's and Wilderness Survival Guides and got rid of them in a prior collection purge.  So why are these so hard to part with?

The Greyhawk books (Adventures hardback and City of... Boxed Set) are the most potentially useful, since Greyhawk was always my setting of choice.  Still, I haven't had a solid gaming group for almost two decades and work commitments means that probably won't change.  The likelihood of another GH campaign seems extraordinarily thin.   Yet they're still on the shelf...

I'm generally done with class-and-level games, and I think of all the pdfs of new-fangled rules-lite games I could buy with the money I get from the sale of these books (and based on recent eBay, they would sell).  Something is holding me back however.  Nostalgia?  Or are there hidden repositories of ideas buried in these books, detected by my gaming subconscious?  What would you do?