phranque - 10:35 am on Sep 19, 2010 (gmt 0)

redirecting a large number of pages to a single page can cause problems from both the SEO perspective and the user experience.
i would approach the problem from the user's perspective.
perhaps a few pages representing categories or information silos would work better than a single generic page.

i would also study the inbound links to these urls.
one or a few of these urls may actually be well worth the effort of recreating and redirecting or even better, keeping at the original url.
in this case it may actually be better to recreate/redirect only the valuable content and letting the rest go 404 or 410, using a custom 404/410 page with some relevant navigation and a search function.

other than the change of ownership issues, this thread has some advice that applies to your situation:

Bought a domain. How to redirect old pages?:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4097996.htm [webmasterworld.com]