Margaret Atwood is a Man Booker prize-winning novelist and her latest title will not be released for one hundred years. She is joining the Future Library, which will see 99 other authors lock their books away in a time capsule.
The Future Library was the brainchild of Scottish artist Katie Paterson, the project is based in Norway, where the city of Oslo has gifted a patch of woodland near the city to the Future Library Trust. Paterson has planted 1,000 trees there, which will grow for 100 years before being cut down and turned into paper to print an anthology of all the books which have been submitted over the century.
“It is the kind of thing you either immediately say yes or no to. You don’t think about it for very long,” said Atwood, speaking from Copenhagen. “I think it goes right back to that phase of our childhood when we used to bury little things in the backyard, hoping that someone would dig them up, long in the future, and say, ‘How interesting, this rusty old piece of tin, this little sack of marbles is. I wonder who put it there?'”
Every year the brain trust will select another title to be included in the project. The physical titles will be stored at the Deichmanske Public Library, which is opening in 2018 in Bjørvika, Oslo. The organizers are even setting up a printing press, to insure that the anthology will actually be printed, when the world switches to digital.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.