This issue looms large in my family. My grandparents traveled the world in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and collected astonishingly large quantities of finely crafted art and heirlooms that they had been warehousing until they died. My parents' generation inherited literal housefuls of this stuff but much of it is of a nature that it would be criminal to dump it in the trash.

A unique challenge of our case is the legal status of some of these goods. For example, we have enough very fine elephant ivory artwork to fill entire storage units.