Books do benefit from a controlled environment, but for relatively short times (a few decades), they won’t be badly damaged by the temperature in a house loft (unless you’re in a really bad part of the world, perhaps). So you may be overestimating the problem. But older books might be more fragile if they’ve not been made to more recent specs.

However, the good news is that passive cooling techniques exist and are increasingly being used in building design. Typically you need a heat chimney to force convection to draw fresh (cooler) air in from below.

A low-tech example would be a black slate roof, with good vents at the top to allow heat out, and vents into the building below to allow it to draw fresh air in from the building below.

However, in winter, your requirements are reversed, and you’ll need to close the roof vents and allow warm air from the rest of the house to heat the loft. 

What techniques will work will depend on whether the house is occupied or not, as many of the more powerful passive techniques require management (e.g. altering blinds and windows as the sun moves). 

You’ll also need to consider where the insulation is placed. In the U.K. a “cold roof” is the standard design (insulation between the top floor and the loft space, so the loft space is almost at outside temperature in the winter, and gets fairly hot in the summer). Adding insulation to the roof will protect the loft against the extremes of temperature. 

Google will help you here, but other techniques to keep a regulated temperature in a house:

 - General insulation on the house will help, and insulation between floors should help (a loft conversion keeps/adds insulation between the old top floor and the new floor in the loft). 
 - Use of naturally insulating building materials (e.g. stone or brick instead of wood)
 - Use of building materials with high specific heat capacity (stone) to even out temperature changes
 - use of external slatted shutters, shades, or verandas to allow ventilation whilst keeping the sun out of windows. 

For your time period, heating is likely to be by a fire in a fireplace. The chimney will distribute heat up the building, including into the loft. Some alterations to the chimney to allow it to transfer more heat into the loft if needed would be possible. 


Moisture is harder to control; wrapping the books suitably would be the best solution. Waxed Paper, leather, waxed cloth, or similar would probably suffice.