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I love books,

This love brought me to gather hundreds of books of all different types. When I disappear, like all old men's belongings, these will be scattered, thrown away, sold, burnt.

Let's imagine a vault with a modest technology, that could keep these books safe for the next 500 years, up to the point where it will be considered of an archeological and cultural value, so that they will form a collection.

There is a long list of items to be taken care of:
Buying the property? Avoiding looting? Make sure great great grand children not looking after their "gran'pa treasure"? Preserve from humidity and light, ground movements? Keeping the secrecy?

Books last for centuries in the dry areas. Shall I prefer a lost cave in an arid region? Or the cold summits of some isolated Canadian mountains?

There are about four solutions that have actually worked in history

Interestingly, this is not just a hypothetical question. Librarians and archivists already seriously study how they can preserve documents for centuries.

An example of an important case that has received a lot of attention is that of blueprints for major pieces of highly durable infrastructure, which might be expected to interact with the development of a city for centuries. The general conclusion is that there are currently no electronic methods that are reliable on anything approaching this time frame, so the first step is always to get digital blueprints transferred to (archival quality) traditional media.

Once you have that, well, there are quite a few examples of libraries of books preserved for 500 years. There are a few examples of much, much older books.

1. The desert method

As you already observed, dryness helps to preserve books. There are three main things that destroy books -- although their relative importance depends on the material used for the pages.

a. Some modern papers inherently self-destruct from chemical break down. This was much less of an issue before pulp paper was developed in the nineteenth century, but always has some effect, and may be exacerbated by exposure to light. However, these reactions require the presence of water. Keeping the paper (or papyrus, etc.) extremely dry will slow them down immensely.

b. Insect and vermin attack can rapidly destroy books. A desert environment is not entirely free of these pests but it does help.

c. In humid environments, fungal attack is also a serious issue. It can occur to some degree in drier environments but halts altogether in extremely dry conditions.

The classic example is the Dead Sea scrolls, some of which are as much as 2300 years old. Most people have heard of them; fewer people realise that in total there are over 900 documents found in 11 different caves. The degree of preservation varies. Some of the scrolls that were simply stacked on the bare earth have disintegrated to fragments and have taken decades to partially reconstruct. However many were stored in earthenware jars with loose fitting ceramic lids. This seems to have given them better protection against insects, and traces of moisture in the soil after (the rare) rains. Some of these scrolls could be simply opened and read, millennia after they were placed there.

This is not a unique case. As another example, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri were documents discarded in rubbish pits by a desert community. With no more protection than shifting desert sands, many are still legible 1400 years after they were simply thrown away.

A potential advantage of this approach is that it is very cheap. Desert land costs pennies an acre, and the only other thing you need is some pots. And no long term personnel tasking.

2. Give them to an institution which will preserve them

Many of the most notable examples of well-preserved ancient documents have been in the care of long-lived institutions that intentionally take care of them. Often these are religious institutions; some are academic; and there are a smaller number of examples by governments or long-lived family businesses or estates. A particularly famous example is the geniza of Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo. In Jewish custom, a geniza is a storeroom for revered or sacred documents. In the late nineteenth century this one was discovered to have over 200,000 documents, mainly in excellent preservation, dating back as much as 700 years. Some included hand-written, personally signed letters from famous mediaeval personages.

Of course it helps that Cairo is also arid; but there are equally excellent examples in the Vatican's libraries, and those of ancient universities such as Oxford and Cambridge. The key is that it is not required to try to solve the preservation of the documents once and for all time, because the self-perpetuating institution will monitor and maintain them.

This does, of course, raise the secondary question of what institutions can be relied upon to last 500 years. Sure, any schmuck can found a cult, but most of them don't outlast the founder! Usually, it will be better to donate them to an institution that has already shown it has the chops for the really long haul.

3. The opposite of secrecy: duplicate them extensively

The great majority of ancient documents that we can still read today do not exist because we have a copy that is millennia old; they are available because they were popular, revered or important, and accessible for copying. If enough copies are made, some will survive to the next generation of duplication. This interacts well with the previous point if the institution has a mission to disseminate documents as well as to preserve them -- such as the scriptoria of mediaeval monasteries.

4. Transcribe them to durable materials

It is hard to keep books for a really long time because paper, parchment and papyrus are easily destroyed. However books have been produced on much more durable materials. Nowadays a holographic copy can be laser etched into stainless steel. In Sumer, 5300 years ago they pressed them into clay tablets. If the document was important, they fired the clay; otherwise they just let it dry. The fired versions are close to indestructible.

Your biggest problem is the books themselves.

Unless the books are made of an acid free paper, they will deteriorate anyway.

See The Deterioration and Preservation of Paper

Now the next question, does anyone need to read it during the next 500 years? If nobody has to read them, you could seal them away in a nitrogen atmosphere inside sealed barrels and they should last but if they are being handled, not so much.

Let's assume you don't have the money to reprint the books into a medium that is more stable than wood-pulp paper. Let's also assume you want to be them readily available, so that discards scanning them into tech that will get obsolete faster than writing.

Your main enemies are the natural acidity of the paper: As the lignin decomposes will make the paper dark and brittle, and sunlight will speed the process. There are factors that contribute to the decomposition of the books: these are sunlight(again), which can make inks and pigments fade, and the humidity which can increase the speed of acid release and unbind the adhesives that hold the books together. Finally, there are factors that can contribute to the endangerment of the collection, namely natural disasters and human intervention.

Let's try to address them in order.

• Paper acidity can be neutralized by dipping the books in an alkaline solution. This is a common practice for books made after the introduction of wood pulp paper and will prolong the life of the books as long as it's periodically dipped. As you don't want these books to be regularly attended, we can scratch periodically, but this would be a mandatory step.


• If the content is more important than the form, you can unbind the books and then laminate the pages in plastic. This will prevent humidity to affect the paper and can hold the ink (specially if it's pigment and not tint) even if the paper itself deteriorates. If form is more important or you don't have time/patience to unbind the books, vacuum wrap them individually in PET (that is more stable than PVC and will take longer to decompose).


• To avoid sunlight, you should make your vault subterranean, as you probably already were thinking of that.


• To prevent degradation by natural disasters and human intervention you should built your vault in a place that is remote and a region that is tectonically stable. This will prove difficult as much of the places that would be suitable (for example, the atacama desert is one of the dries places in earth) are also mineral rich and/or tectonically active.

So we're looking at a small two layer concrete coffin, covered in some kind of moisture absorbing salt, with just enough space for the books to be, situated in a rocky, medium-altitude, sparsely populated and mineral depleted place (the bottom of a mineshaft would be a handy place to put the vault).

Let me suggest an easier way, if I may. Assuming you have the money to do all this, you also can have the money to set up a trust fund with the purpose of preserving your library. Most museums started this way (and in my city of Barcelona, we have the Frederic Marés museum, which is basically a place where a very rich garbage collector put everything, from cigar rings to stolen gothic sculptures). What is more, if your interest in preserving the books is more like showing what a normal person of your era would collect you can talk with a museum that deals with ethnology (the study of the human cultures) and propose the fund with that purpose: they will be probably more than happy to catalog and preserve your books. If you live in United States your best bet would be the Smithsonian.

The easiest solution to this is put them in the vault, use an oil absorbing rag, wipe all of the books down, vacuum seal the rooms, and then use vacuums to pump the room empty of all existing air.

In the absence of air, acids cannot Oxidize. I would also recommend removing all light, as light can also cause damage to books, paper, paintings, color, and parchments.

This is how the Vatican handles the most rare and valuable artifacts it possesses.