Containing Evil Book Artifacts

[Avigor]

Watching the first season of Ash vs Evil Dead for the first time on Netflix, and my jaw hit the floor when I saw how Ash completely, epically failed to properly lockdown the Necronomicon Ex Mortis (first episode approx 5 mins in so not a huge spoiler)...

So my question is, how what would you do to prevent any given evil, magical tome that can't move itself from falling into the wrong hands or otherwise being misused?

I'd lock into the most secure, unopenable box possible, put that box in a safety deposit box in the most stable and secure bank I can find, and find some means to trick out the account and/or my will so that it will basically stay in there for perpetuity. I'd also have a note in the box with the book, and somehow permanently scribed onto both the outside and inside of the box, explaining that the contents must be kept secure for all of time. Also, make sure the story is secretly passed down through some sort of society or family (preferably more than one) keeping watch on the bank.

Granted, that's not perfect, but it ought to keep it under control for at least a while...

[GrayDeath]

Given enough money, I`d put it into a Box made of a combined Titanioum Alloy exterior with Hafnium-Carbide reinforcements, cloth itself into multiple layers of carbon fibers, put the Box itself into a nice and irregular concrete "stone" and drop it into the deepest sea canyon I can get to.

Noone will ever find it.

[Frozen_Feet]

If it's not indestructible? Burn it. Duh.

If it is incapable of motion? Grab a shovel, going in a random spot in the woods, bury it in a pit, go home, promptly forget about it. The chances of anyone ever finding it are astronomical and if it's not indestructible, natural elements will take care of the rest.

"Evil book artifacts" only begin to be hard to contain when they have blatantly supernatural traits (indestructibility, ability to move, ability to telepathically influence people) or when the people trying to acquire them have such abilities. In absence of such, an "evil book artifact" would be 99.99% secure sitting in my bookshelf and would require me to brag to the mob (etc.) that I have it for that 0.001% worst case scenario to be realized.

[vasilidor]

1: drop it in molten lead 2: after the lead has cooled drop that into a steel box 3: drop that into a deep sea trench, or bury it somewhere if unable to get to a trench. or find a nice volcano.

[The Glyphstone]

Hide it in the Pit of Doom beyond the Chasm of Despair, guarded by the Dragons of Destruction. Because if I have an evil book, I'm probably an evil villain, and thus bound to obey certain genre clauses by contract.

[Xuc Xac]

I'd lock into the most secure, unopenable box possible, put that box in a safety deposit box in the most stable and secure bank I can find, and find some means to trick out the account and/or my will so that it will basically stay in there for perpetuity. I'd also have a note in the box with the book, and somehow permanently scribed onto both the outside and inside of the box, explaining that the contents must be kept secure for all of time. Also, make sure the story is secretly passed down through some sort of society or family (preferably more than one) keeping watch on the bank.

Granted, that's not perfect, but it ought to keep it under control for at least a while...

That pretty much guarantees that it will fall into the wrong hands. You might as well put a big flashing neon sign that says "Super valuable stuff inside! Too hot and juicy for you! Stay away because it will blow your mind!"

The fact that you have several conspiratorial organizations aware of the treasure box just makes it more likely that someone will decide to make a move for it.

[BeerMug Paladin]

Use it myself for petty, pointless things.

The way things work, I'm sure some self-appointed hero would show up to steal the book from me so I wouldn't have to worry about it.

It's now their job to safeguard it.

[Frozen_Feet]

Also, just because it is hilarious, let me paraphrase a certain RPG blogger: pretty much all evil book artifacts can either be found from the net or rented from your local library. What keeps them "safe" is that majority of people are too lazy to read them, majority of people who read them are too stupid to understand them, and majority of people who understand them are too afraid of the consequences to actually act on them.

It is sort of the same deal as with martial arts these days. It is not hard to find a club which would connect you to a real tradition and teach you genuinely functional ways for beating up people. But it might be bloody expensive, it takes years of dedicated practice to learn the skill, it involves sweat, pain and tears, and then if you ever use your martial arts to beat people up you'll be under scrutiny and potential punishment from the part of law enforcement and all other practicioners of the art. Hence, the amount of people who'll bother is limited.

[GreatWyrmGold]

"Evil book artifacts" only begin to be hard to contain when they have blatantly supernatural traits (indestructibility, ability to move, ability to telepathically influence people) or when the people trying to acquire them have such abilities.

Isn't that true of basically any artifacts? Books just have the potential added excuse of "This knowledge could be important, it needs to be available to the right hands". Which most writers don't use, because some knowledge is apparently Evil in and of itself. Which bugs me.

[SZbNAhL]

I'd slip it into the next extra-solar space probe the ESA (or NASA, Roscosmos, ISRO or whoever your local space programme are) sends off. Or if I have unlimited resources, I just build my own rocket and fire it off into a black hole.

[Frozen_Feet]

Isn't that true of basically any artifacts? Books just have the potential added excuse of "This knowledge could be important, it needs to be available to the right hands". Which most writers don't use, because some knowledge is apparently Evil in and of itself. Which bugs me.

Nope.

The idea of artifacts as indestructible or having wills of their own are a pretty specific ideas that wete mostly copied over from Lord of the Rings. But there are plenty in both fiction and real life which don't have any such traits.

Especially for books, the important thing is the information they contain, and frequently it's their fragility which makes them all the more valuable. Quite often, the whole issue surrounding a book artifact is finding and destroying it before the bad guys get it, or preventing it from being destroyed by them.

Also, in context of fantasy and especially something like Magic of Names or.memetic hazards, knowledge can be inherently dangerous and the world better if it's destroyed. If that bugs you, you need imagine worse things.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I'd slip it into the next extra-solar space probe the ESA (or NASA, Roscosmos, ISRO or whoever your local space programme are) sends off. Or if I have unlimited resources, I just build my own rocket and fire it off into a black hole.

...It's tough enough just to fling a space probe out of the solar system; doing it precisely enough that it hits a black hole (instead of, say, slingshotting around it and flying through some other corner of the galaxy) is probably impossible with modern technology, and doing it within a timeframe such that it can't be snatched up by a future generation with superior spaceflight propulsion even more so. Not to mention that you're not slipping something into a spacecraft without anyone knowing; they don't have unnecessary space, and carefully make sure there's no excess mass, and that's assuming you can slip past security.
Stick to volcanoes. They're simpler and more practical.

Nope.
The idea of artifacts as indestructible or having wills of their own are a pretty specific ideas that wete mostly copied over from Lord of the Rings. But there are plenty in both fiction and real life which don't have any such traits.

Point missed. My point was that any artifact which can't actively defend itself or attack others with its supernatural powers is easy to contain.

Also, in context of fantasy and especially something like Magic of Names or.memetic hazards, knowledge can be inherently dangerous and the world better if it's destroyed. If that bugs you, you need imagine worse things.

That's usually not the justification. The justification is usually just "People could use this to do bad things, so the knowledge is bad." And that kind of "logic" really bugs me.

[redwizard007]

I'd have to found a order of knights to safeguard the book. They would have no particular resistance to corruption from the book or outside sources, so we would also introduce a smaller order of inquisitors to root out corruption. The inquisitors could have no access to the book, because of potential corruption themselves, but would act as spies and counselors for the orders members.

[Frozen_Feet]

@GreatWyrmGold: apologies, I read your question as implying that having blatant supernatural powers is what's "true of basically any artifact".

As for the logic that bugs you, even if you nix the conclusion of "so the knowledge is bad", that "people could use this to do bad things" might still stand and is sufficient reason to restrict and destroy information. For practical purposes, "bad" and "dangerous" aren't all that distinct.

[Kaptin Keen]

How long term solution are we looking for?

Nuclear waste is stored for essentially good and ever, and no one goes mucking about in one of those barrels. Volcanoes erupt, and underwater mining rigs are now a thing, so - I'd say an old salt mine filled with barrels of lowgrade nuclear waste.

[Frozen_Feet]

If it's the writing in the book that's the issue, long enough for the script it uses to become indecipherable. Depending on how it's written, this could be achieved in a generation, in a century, or in a few millenia. Sometimes, a freak occurrence may lead to deciphering an obsolete text: Egyptian hieroglyphs were indecipherable untill the Rosetta stone was found by accident.

By contrast, the Voynich manuscript is only few centuries old but has eluded translation because for all anyone knows the writer invented the script (and possibly the language) on their own.

[Leon]

Between Sanctified bookends on the shelf of a temple in the middle of nowhere that no one has ever heard of, staffed by Illiterate Monks.

[Tinkerer]

See now with the book in question from the original example has displayed some influence over the physical world. Namely limited telekinesis and some possible telepathy. Plus according to deleted scenes if destroyed it seems to completely reform some distance away from the spot of destruction. Given those parameters I'd say locked in a trunk in the protagonists home isn't too bad of a place to have it, next to having it locked in a trunk and buried 6' under at the protagonists home. Although I'd probably try and pick a less crowded home than a trailer park. Maybe see about getting a small patch of ground just outside of the city.

[Lord Torath]

Give it, along with a permanent black marker, to my one-year-old. Seat her at the table next to me while I draw in a sketchbook. By the time she turns three, the book will be safe. She can't read, so there's no need to worry about her learning things she shouldn't. And her black marker work will make it hard for anyone stumbling upon it later to read it either. Alternatively, up-end a bottle of ink on the thing, and let it fully saturate the pages.

Alternate plan: Glue a blank sheet over both sides of each page, and turn it into a family scrapbook. The triple-thick pages may just crack the binding, but it's a magic book, so it probably won't.

[vasilidor]

how about this for a book: it is self cleaning and self repairing, and gives cold, logical reasons to do horrible evil things when you read it, customizing itself to whomever reads it and there life situation. further more everything it tells you is both within your power to do and beneficial to you.

that is a book I want to see you consider.

[JellyPooga]

1) Place book in unassuming, commonplace covering and/or container. E.g. disguise it to look like a telephone directory and put it in a plain brown cardboard box with "junk" written on it in marker pen or something.

2) Place container in a location that is appropriate to its disguise. Preferably a private, rather than public, location. E.g. the cellar of a disused or derelict farmhouse.

3) Set up a series of cameras around said location, set to automatically begin filming when the container is tampered with. Ensure the digital recording of any ensuing events is recoverable without the need to revisit the location and that you get notification that footage has been recorded.

4) Retreat to a safe distance. Preferably in a different country.

5) Wait for the inevetible. It should only take a few months before some "dumb college kids" show up and get themselves murderised by whatever evil lurks within the tome.

6) Edit the footage and market it as an indie horror film. Use this to launch your career as a film-maker.

7) ???

8) Profit!

Optional: 9) Repeat. In the process, sell soul to eternal evil in exchange for immortality.

[Frozen_Feet]

It is completely safe in my bookshelf, just like all the other books I own but I'm not reading.

"Cold logical reasons to do evil" are not actually very impressive, because most people do not adhere to cold logic, they adhere to emotion.

Nothing stops me from going to a random spot in the woods and burying it there.

This is completely detached from whether I'd use to my benefit, mind you. Since you have neither established what the book considers evil nor have I established that I'm wholly good, there's a good chance I might implement some of the book's advice. But to actually get out of my hands, the book would have to contrive a situation where:

1) it is giving me cold, rational reasons to do evil in a way that benefits me
2) where publishing, recreating or surrendering a book that gives anyone else rational, self-beneficial reason to do evil is in my best interests

It should be clear from just that, that in order for there to be any danger of the book getting out of my hands, it needs to be manipulative way beyond giving a crap about cold logic or my best interest. It needs to betray my self-interest somewhere along the way.

[vasilidor]

ok, for further context: it gives you advice that when followed has the following results: a person is brought to harm, and you benefit. possibly multiple persons. further more, it starts with small things and small hurts, or things that seem like it would be small hurts, for small benefits and continues to nudge you down the path of evil so that you benefit more the more damage and pain and suffering you bring to others. but you always benefit from following the advice.

[Frozen_Feet]

That doesn't make the book any harder to contain. It's still relying on me being motivated enough and immoral enough to actually read it and put anything in it to practice. It still requires a really contrived situation from those premises to actually get me to publish, recreate, distribute or surrender it to anyone else. And still nothing stops me from going and burying it in the woods the moment I think holding onto it is any risk to my person.

[wumpus]

...It's tough enough just to fling a space probe out of the solar system; doing it precisely enough that it hits a black hole (instead of, say, slingshotting around it and flying through some other corner of the galaxy) is probably impossible with modern technology, and doing it within a timeframe such that it can't be snatched up by a future generation with superior spaceflight propulsion even more so. Not to mention that you're not slipping something into a spacecraft without anyone knowing; they don't have unnecessary space, and carefully make sure there's no excess mass, and that's assuming you can slip past security.
Stick to volcanoes. They're simpler and more practical.

The problem with volcanoes is that presumably the magma will burn through anything containing an industructable evil book, and the evil book will invariably float on the magma (just about everything floats on rock). This means that after any eruption, the book will wind up outside and on top of any magma spewed out. Not good.

I'd dump it in the ocean (preferably a deep part, but just off the continental shelf (thus "ordinary ocean depth") would be good enough. Perhaps encased in lead (or possibly stainless steel or anything else likely to resist seawater and not float).

Black holes would be pretty irrelevant. Simply traveling through space slowly should be sufficient to last however many billion years the universe still has (ideally you would to fling the thing away from the Milky Way "disc" at a velocity sufficient to escape all of the Earth/Sun/Milky Way. Accidental contact afterwards should be virtually impossible (and amazingly difficult for an evil overlord to "catch up" to your craft). But unfortunately you would likely leave a paper trail for any archvillain to find and locate the book. Dumping it in the ocean would be quiet and nearly impossible to learn where you dropped it (possibly by a drone [probably a boat-drone] to take a random course and sink after a random number of days).

[vasilidor]

eh, that is true. but at least it is not a quantum book that simply appears whenever you turn your head. that would be a pain.

[GreatWyrmGold]

As for the logic that bugs you, even if you nix the conclusion of "so the knowledge is bad", that "people could use this to do bad things" might still stand and is sufficient reason to restrict and destroy information. For practical purposes, "bad" and "dangerous" aren't all that distinct.

Anything can be used to do bad things. Anything can be dangerous. Therefore, your logic demands we destroy the world so there isn't anything left that people can do bad things with. This is obviously a ludicrous conclusion, yet people somehow seem to think that it's perfectly valid logic when dealing with information.
This bothers me not just because of the poor logic, but because of the impact such beliefs have on the world. In particular, several fields of research are held back by people who are afraid of what it could do in the wrong hands*, without realizing that already-existing technology (which they don't object to) could easily do comparably-bad things in the wrong hands. It seems like a knee-jerk reactionary response to knowledge and possibilities that one doesn't like, rather than a reasoned cost/benefit analysis.
Combined with how damn cliche it is, I really don't like fiction reinforcing this idea. Just once, I'd like to see a hero take forbidden knowledge from the villain and turn the same spells the villain put in his soul-sucking doomsday device or whatever to make technology to make the world demonstrably better. Or at least a superweapon that doesn't suck souls.

*Or at least, what it could do in the wrong hands in a sci-fi movie, which may or may not have any relevance to what it could do in the real world. but that's a separate issue.

"Cold logical reasons to do evil" are not actually very impressive, because most people do not adhere to cold logic, they adhere to emotion.

I hate that dichotomy. I also hate that cold logic is so often demonized, as if simple logic would be enough to make someone do evil. After all, logic requires a certain set of predefined axioms*, and most peoples' axioms include some variant of "don't be a ****". Those without such an axiom don't need a book to get them to be evil.

*Which is, incidentally, one of the simpler ways emotion gets involved in logic.

The problem with volcanoes is that presumably the magma will burn through anything containing an industructable evil book, and the evil book will invariably float on the magma (just about everything floats on rock). This means that after any eruption, the book will wind up outside and on top of any magma spewed out. Not good.

The book is indestructible? We really need to nail down the qualities of this thing before coming up with containment plans.

(ideally you would to fling the thing away from the Milky Way "disc" at a velocity sufficient to escape all of the Earth/Sun/Milky Way. Accidental contact afterwards should be virtually impossible (and amazingly difficult for an evil overlord to "catch up" to your craft)

You say that like it's easy. Galactic escape velocity from our "altitude" is ~537 km/s, and the Sun's orbital velocity is ~220 km/s. You would need over 300 km/s of delta-v; for reference, the Saturn V had less than 20 km/s of delta-v.
And if you want to hide a book in deep space, you can just bury it in some chunk of icy gravel between planets and nobody's likely to find it. I mean, unless they watch you hide it, but that's an even bigger problem for just flinging a space probe out into the wide black yonder; it's going to have properties and a trajectory that make it clearly artificial, not to mention the freaking enormous rockets.
Bonus: If you have the technology to do any of this space stuff, you could probably find a decent excuse to stick something in a space rock. (Something like, "I want to put this computer there so our civilization has a backup in case someone decides to destroy it." You might be seen as paranoid, but you would have a good alibi.

[ORione]

My bookshelf, obviously. That's where my books go. With books I don't want other people to find, I put them on the shelf sideways and put other books in front of them.

[SpoonR]

Slip a dustcover on it titled "Modern Portfolio Theory and Investment Analysis", put it in a public library.

Gianitp riddle

[Lord Torath]

1) Place book in unassuming, commonplace covering and/or container. E.g. disguise it to look like a telephone directory and put it in a plain brown cardboard box with "junk" written on it in marker pen or something.

2) Place container in a location that is appropriate to its disguise. Preferably a private, rather than public, location. E.g. the cellar of a disused or derelict farmhouse.

3) Set up a series of cameras around said location, set to automatically begin filming when the container is tampered with. Ensure the digital recording of any ensuing events is recoverable without the need to revisit the location and that you get notification that footage has been recorded.

4) Retreat to a safe distance. Preferably in a different country.

5) Wait for the inevetible. It should only take a few months before some "dumb college kids" show up and get themselves murderised by whatever evil lurks within the tome.

6) Edit the footage and market it as an indie horror film. Use this to launch your career as a film-maker.

7) ???

8) Profit!

Optional: 9) Repeat. In the process, sell soul to eternal evil in exchange for immortality.

If you change the label from "junk" to "Christmas Lights", no one will ever open it.