I think the really hard part is explaining how this lucky find had Action Comics #1, the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence and an original Gutenberg Bible all in pristine condition in the same place at the same time in the wall of a barn or buried somewhere.
Someone said it above…find a big lottery payday and nail that. Easy and need only do it once and a lot less work and likely a lot more wealthy at the end.
AFAIK that works for some antique worth a couple of grand if genuine. For something like an undiscovered letter from Ben Franklin the bar is a much higher.
This requires locating a suitable ancestor living in the relevant period. You travel back and carry on correspondence with Ben Franklin or whomever using this persons name. Once you have a suitable number of letters, you go find a bookbinder. You have them construct one of those thick, ornate family bibles with the letters secreted in the thick front and back covers. You then seek out this great-great-great relative, claim to be a distant relation and present them with this valuable family heirloom that you claim is there rightful property. The bible gets passed down from generation to generation, with births and marraiges recorded in its pages, as is done with these family bibles. Once you return, you now have provenance for the letters as they were replies to letters ‘written’ by your own relative. Profit.
*cough*
The Harvard Law School Library bought the document known as ‘HLS MS 172’ in 1946 for a sum of $27.50, according to the library’s accession register. The auction catalogue described the manuscript as a “copy … made in 1327 … somewhat rubbed and damp-stained.” It had been purchased a month or so earlier by the London bookdealers Sweet & Maxwell, via Sotheby’s, from a Royal Air Force war hero for a mere £42.
Stranger
Button, Button
You need to keep up the rent. They will eventually drill out the lock if you don’t.
Excluding libraries and archives, which are designed for this purpose, but which are the legitimate owners of everything they hold, we get historical documents mainly from family collections maintained across decades or even centuries. Its hard however to ensure that some feckless ancient cousin isn’t going to discover the precious docs you’ve salted away in between leaves of books in 1825 to ‘discover’ in 2025, and recognised their value.
If you want to sell for big bucks you need to not only be able to guarantee that the doc is genuine, but that you are the legit owner. Burying it and ‘finding’ it on someone else’s property voids your title, and for a $1M there will be counter-claimants who will have better ultimate claim to ownership. To me the most reliable method is a legal deposit with a law firm that you know is still going to be around, and do it as a contract to retain papers in perpetuity, for which I will pay $XXX, and which is sufficient to cover likely future fees from the interest. That won’t be cheap, and might even eat up a lot of the profit from one Ben Franklin letter, so you may as well get all fan-boy and write to as many famous people as possible and conserve a decent pile of paper. ‘Dear Napoleon, I admire your work …’ You could do that with a letter-book so there is a record of your initial outgoing request.
Regarding preservation, any dry, low humidity environment is usually fine for pre-20th century paper. I work on them all the time and even the bad stuff is better than recent media.
That’s why I like my library idea, they could keep records of what was deposited, and when, and being an old, established public institution, they’d have some significant built-in credibility when the old papers are “discovered” by the foundation during some routine audit, or something.
Too well preserved is going to raise red flags. Perhaps find some land in a desert that was continuously unoccupied but came of sale in present day and bury it there back then for you to later buy that land. However can you get to the deserts back then? Do you have a way to travel to it, in an addition to time travel?
If all you need is aging and not pollen present in 1910s eastern Nebraska/Western Iowa, why not find a spot near Yucatan just before the Chicxulub impact? You could build whatever facilities you need and not worry about anyone tampering with it and all evidence would be gone by the modern age.
This might be naïveté or ignorance or whatever on my part, but I’ll put this out there in hopes of getting set straight: right about where you’d maybe expect this or that founding father to have been up and around, you can often see little old lengths of brick wall that are still in place on what look to be not-terribly-expensive properties: they’re common enough that I’m guessing they’re not landmarks or anything, but the bricks endure well enough that there’s been no reason for any given property owner to spend the money to bother wrecking the decorative stuff.
Do I have that right? That, in real life, someone could’ve buried — but presumably didn’t bother to bury — documents under a bit of decorative brick wall getting put up way back when? And that a time traveler would know which lengths of short brick wall have managed to endure right up until today, and some of them are on land that could be bought pretty cheap?
And you only need it to work once?
Though are they that old? 100-150 years I’m sure are pretty common (on the US East Coast). But 250+ years I’m less sure.
Of course much more common in Europe but then you have the problem that, they take preserving old structures like that seriously, if you go smashing it up to retrieve your original Shakespeare folio or whatever, you’re gonna get in trouble. You would also have trouble digging up your loot too as there buried treasure laws would apply.
But then you don’t get to keep it, the institution keeps it.
I’ve thought about this from time to time as I do a lot of genealogical work and I would love to have papers from my ancestors. Plus all the old ledgers and such that have been lost over the years. So if one wanted to go back and hide something, there are PLENTY of old houses, barns, and cemeteries that are still standing, or at least haven’t had the foundations redone.
I can see two ways of doing it. One buy the land today, some old places are cheap, do some research on the place and see what buildings and such have been around and still standing. Once you come back, take it out and you can just say “look what I found on my property". The other would be to bury/hide it, go back and just get it, then go to some old family estate action, buy a bunch of stuff and say you found it in there.
Earlier cemeteries were mentioned. I think that’s a great idea - except I wouldn’t put the stuff in a casket.
Since we know these cemeteries have been continuously maintained, we know that there won’t be any development that might pave over a hiding spot. So, find a location at the cemetery that won’t support a grave (maybe near a big tree), and bury it there.
I guess there’s a risk that you’d get caught. Failing this, I’d bury it just offshore, or on a beach.
Lots of people with metal detectors on beaches.
Depends on where you look for a cemetery, in my area I can think of a couple of hundred old family cemeteries that are not kept up. A few of them have stone walls around them so I would probably put something near the wall. You wouldn’t really need to put anything in to a casket, just dig down a couple of feet and leave what you want.
One would need to do some research though as a lot of stones have been moved over the years. I know my old family cemetery is still there, has been there since the late 1700s. Right now it’s very over grown and no one goes there. While not common in my area, there are a couple of mausoleums one could hide something in.
On the plus side I could meet my 8-9th great grandparents.
If you go back and read my original post, that’s why I suggested a two-tier organization. A foundation that you own, that endows the library, with an agreement that they store records for the foundation. So it’s a public/private kind of repository. Anything you deposit as the foundation belongs to the foundation, not the library, and the foundation belongs to you, so you own all those old records.
Documents are a fools game. Too much to go wrong.
Go for sturdy things like coins, where less wear is more desirable. Or… if you’re devious, research where something outrageously valuable was randomly found, like a Van Gogh in an attic, or priceless pottery at a thrift store, and go there to find it first.
I’ve always thought you should go for common consumers items, that have developed a lucrative nostalgia market, since most of them would have been worn out and tossed away. Vintage cars are valuable, but storing them would take a lot of space. But other things would be easier, like the very first Star Wars toys, kept in original packaging. You could store dozens of cases of these on just a few shelving units in a warehouse.
There is one simple dodge that would easily get round the problem of new documents still being new if they were brought back in the time machine - travel back in time and acquire documents that were then already old. Tests for old documents tend to be able to tell whether they are old or recent, but, beyond that, the margins of error are often very large. If a test on a genuine 1200 document came back as 1600 +/- 200 years, everyone would just assume that the test was inaccurate, especially as the chances of anyone in 1600 being able to produce a convincing fake of a 1200 document would be the more improbable hypothesis. Acquiring such items would also be easy. Plenty of types of older documents only became valuable in recent centuries.