The papers of Sir Richard Francis Burton, which are among the long list of valuables foolishly destroyed by the small-minded heirs of great men.
Seems like tha major angles are covered, so I’d go local and retrieve The Golden Horns of Gallehus before that jackass Heidenreich stole them and melted them down.
Not only would I save two very cool 5th century artifacts from destruction, I might spare untold generations of Danish schoolchildren from having to listen to and interpret Oehlenschlager’s frankly *interminable *poem on the subject of their discovery and loss. Golden age of poetry, I think not.
Maltese Falcon?
Those aren’t lost. I worked with many of them when I was writing my aforementioned dissertation. The oldest one was a Wycliffite Bible from c.1450 or so.
1937 - Fox Pictures film vault
If I take them off the reel, I wonder how many films I could save. Films that were destroyed in a fire in 1937, with no copies left.
What a great thread topic.
Can I grab Shakespeare’s works? Or would then the world never learn of him until I showed them to the world?
First, you should never put really old china in the dishwasher! 
Second, I’m obviously not going to the right antique shows. 
Crimoney, you’re in real danger of being brought down by the Wonder Twins or Scrappy Doo. What you are attributing to the real Stalin and Beria was the work of my replicants. The originals were no more than small time thugs. You need to start thinking more about actual villainy and less about how you look in your little villain outfits.
The quarto edition of Love’s Labour’s Won, a.k.a. Shakespeare’s lost play. We know that it was being sold at a bookseller’s stall in 1603, but no copies survive; I assume that this creates no paradoxes.
Fermat’s other notebook - the one with the wider margins.
A lot of the good ones have already been taken (camera and photographing the contents of the Library of Alexandria – but I want to know, after which sacking would you jump to? Wikipedia cites 3-4 sackings), so… um.
The Antikythera Mechanism, right after the boat sank? I’ve been fascinated by it for a long time, and I’d love to see what it really looked like back then, instead of the reconstructions that various people have done.
Ooh. I know. I’d probably dig up and take pictures of every paper from Archimedes that I could find. He had only about seven treatises that survived, and the rest we know only because other people referred to them in their own work. I’ve always wondered wtf that Roman soldier was thinking… :smack:
The missing episodes of Doctor Who - as many as i can stuff in the backpack.
The tape with the 18 and a half minute gap on it before it was “accidentally” erased. I am really, really curious as to what was on that tape.
Syd Barrett’s early 1967 solo demo tape he did for producer Joe Boyd. The tape contained original Syd songs he thought were unsuitable for Pink Floyd. The idea was Boyd would shop the songs to other artists to record. Boyd subsequently lost what as thought to be the only copy of the tape.
I would travel back to either of two historical eras: (1) travel back to 1777. According to history, after the Declaration of Independence was signed, copies were sent out to each of the 13 colonies for ratification. What if one of those ratified copies sent back went missing (into the historical backpack)?
(2) I’ve always heard that the Beatles played in Hamburg, Germany in 1960, and that amateur audiotapes were made just before George Harrison (soon followed by the other Beatles) was deported. I’d stuff a copy (or the original) into that backpack.
Love, Phil
The original Ten Commandments tablets, if they actually existed.
Or Antoni Gaudi’s blueprints for Sagrada Familia, which were destroyed during the Spanish Civil War.
Hmmph. I was thinking "bring back the (entire) library of Alexandria, until Skald restricted me on size!
OK… can I shadow that Wm Shakespeare fellow over the course of many years and snag a copy of anything he writes that we don’t seem to have a copy of?
Stupid size restrictions! My first choice would have been the Library at Alexandria. But I guess I could stuff maybe ten of the most important tomes from there.
All of Tesla’s secret papers that the government took upon his death.
Whatever original Egyptian document Plato based his Atlantis legend on.
A bunch of the Mayan/Aztec codices that the Spanish destroyed.
I just adore this one. My kind of op.
Anyway…for me, the “Tsetse” Primary from the B-43 nuclear weapon lost in deep ocean in an accident with an A-4 Skyhawk from the USS Ticonderoga in December, 1965.
What I do with it after that is my business.
Burn, baby…burn…
As much of Da Vinci’s diaries and journals etc. as possible. Alternate: My maternal grandfather’s paternal grandmother’s birth certificate, (my great-great grandmother on my mother’s paternal side) and other tribal documentation papers.