Not that long ago I wrote an article discussing what it would be like, realistically, if you were to accidentally travel back in time to the Victorian era. At the end of that article, I mentioned that the best thing you could bring with you on a time-traveling adventure is a Kindle, or similar e-reader, stuffed full of the knowledge of the 21st century. Why a Kindle? Well, I own a Kindle, and I love it. However, there's far more to it than that. First of all, the low-power e-ink display makes it perfect for long stretches without access to AC power which, let's face it, pretty perfectly describes time travel. Second, it's small. Thus, you can carry it with you. Third, it uses very little power displaying a page, so that you can leave a page open for a long time while you manually copy it down onto paper, if necessary. Fourth, it has enough space to hold a ton of books. And let me make no bones about this: you will need a ton of books. What I'm going to do is lay out for you everything that should be on your time-traveling Kindle in order to fully prepare you for practically anything. In essence, this will be a cobbled-together version of the fictional Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy featured by Douglas Adams in the eponymously-titled series. I'll break these down into categories, because there are just an absolute ton of books. Every time I thought I'd gotten all the books anyone would need, I'd think of something else. So if you're genuinely concerned about traveling through time to any point in human history, it's time to start collecting all of these books!

Survival The very first thing to do upon arriving in an unknown time is to assure your survival by making sure that your basic needs are met. This includes food, water, and shelter. While you may be able to rely on any nearby settlements, I would avoid people at first, for a wide variety of reasons. Exposure to people increases your exposure to pathogens, not to mention it increases the likelihood of you being singled out as different, which was pretty much never a good thing. Staying away from the population in order to properly prepare yourself for contact is your best bet. As such, you can rely on this book to help you with that stage of your journey! SAS Survival Handbook, Revised Edition: For Any Climate, in Any Situation Above are anonymized members of the SAS, the UK's Special Air Service, which is comparable to the American Marine Corps. You can probably trust these guys to know about survival.

Closing Notes There's just no way to prepare for every single eventuality, and to include every single important text. There are just too many possibilities. I could literally spend years trying to compile all of the relevant books, only to find that half of them are out of date when I've finished. As a result, the above collection is simply a survey of what could be a much, much deeper rabbit hole. Ideally, I'd love to have books dedicated to every single major civilization of history, as well as geological survey maps of the entire world. It would also be handy to include dictionaries for every language ever spoken on Earth (that we know of), listings of every astronomical phenomenon ever recorded, logs of weather patterns for specific days throughout history, etc. The list just goes on and on. Still, the list compiled above is a pretty solid one, and will serve you well on your journey through time. Just remember that as soon as you start influencing the past, your history books may soon belong to a future that will never be! Images in this article are from Elite UK Forces, InterAksyon, David Foley, Technology Service Center, Science Blogs, Deadly Movies, and mullica.