Ancient books preserve invaluable cultural heritage, yet their images often suffer from complex degradations caused by long-term ageing, environmental exposure, and physical damage. Existing ancient book image restoration benchmarks are limited in scale and rely on simplified degradation simulations, which cannot fully represent real-world degradation patterns and restrict the generalization ability of restoration models. To address these challenges, we introduce AncBench, a large-scale synthetic paired benchmark containing 100K aligned clean-degraded image pairs. AncBench models realistic composite degradations through a comprehensive degradation pipeline that considers material ageing, paper texture variation, blur, staining, water-induced geometric distortion, and local occlusion. Furthermore, we propose AncRestore, a degradation-aware visual-prior routing network for ancient book image restoration. AncRestore first learns degradation representations from degraded images and then dynamically selects and integrates suitable visual priors according to different degradation characteristics. Guided by these degradation cues, a dynamic routing mechanism combines expert-wise and region-wise routing strategies adaptively adjusts the contribution of these priors across different regions, enabling the model to recover both global appearance and local text details. Extensive experiments show that AncRestore effectively suppresses composite degradations while preserving text structures and enhancing restoration quality against other methods, highlighting its application potential for intelligent ancient book image restoration in cultural heritage preservation.

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