Margen
In 2014, Scottish artist Katie Paterson planted a thousand spruce trees in the Nordmarka forest, just outside Oslo. Their fate is already written: in 2114 they will be felled to make the paper for an anthology of one hundred books.
Each year, a different writer hands in a manuscript nobody may read: no editors, no critics, not even their own family. Only the title is made public. The text is sealed away in the Silent Room, a chamber in Oslo's public library lined with wood from that very forest. Margaret Atwood opened the series in 2014 with “Scribbler Moon”; David Mitchell, Elif Shafak, Han Kang and Ocean Vuong have since handed in theirs.
Hardly any of them will see their book printed, and hardly any reader alive today will get to open them. The Future Library is a calm wager: that a century from now there will still be trees, ink, readers and curiosity. Every spring, as the spruces grow a little taller, someone writes in secret for people who have not yet been born.