On a lone tree in the Nordmarka forest just north of Oslo, there's a sign that reads "Framtidsbiblioteket - Future Library."
In the year 2114, the wood from 1,000 spruce saplings growing here will be turned into paper and used to print an anthology of 100 unpublished books -- which no one is allowed to read until then.
This forest-to-be is part of the
Future Library project, started four years ago by Scottish artist Katie Paterson, who wanted to create an original library of 100 manuscripts from established authors, to be printed 100 years in the future.
"I was on a train doodling and drawing tree rings and I just made a very fast connection between the rings and chapters in a book, and the idea of trees becoming books in the future and growing over time," she said in a phone interview.
Margaret Atwood's Future Library book is titled 'Scribbler moon,' and she believes that readers in 2114 may require a 'paleo-anthropologist' to decode some of it, because of how language will have evolved over the course of a century.
"And so I imagined this forest, that embodied time and the authors' words, growing over a century. And each author's voice became like a chapter inside the growing rings of the trees. That was many years ago, but I never thought that it was actually going to happen." Read more here:
