A Library of Books No One Can Read For 100 Years

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: The BBC looks at a 100-year art project in which famous authors write books that will not be published until the year 2113. An annual ceremony takes place near a forest of sapling trees which will be turned into paper in the year 2113 and then used for printing those books.

From the article:

It began with the author Margaret Atwood, who wrote a story called Scribbler Moon, and since then the library has solicited submissions from all over the world... All the manuscripts will be stored for almost a century inside locked glass drawers in a hidden corner of Oslo's main public library, within a small, wooden repository called the Silent Room. In 2114, the drawers will be unlocked, and the trees chopped down — and 100 stories hidden for a century will finally be published in one go.


It's part of Scottish artist Katie Paterson's fascination with the passage of time:

One of her first works, Vatnajokull (the sound of) [included] a phone number that anyone could call to listen to an Icelandic glacier melting. Dial the number, and you'd be routed to a microphone beneath the water in the Jökulsárlón lagoon on Iceland's south coast, where blue-tinged icebergs calve away and float towards the sea....

One of her most recent exhibitions in Edinburgh, Requiem at Ingleby Gallery, featured 364 vials of crushed dust, each one representing a different moment in deep time. Vial #1 was a sample of presolar grains older than the Sun, followed by powdered four-billion-year-old rocks, corals from prehistoric seas, and other traces of the distant past. A few visitors were invited to pour one of the vials into a central urn: when I was there in June, I poured #227, a four-million-year-old Asteroidea fossil, a kind of sea star....

Of all her work exploring the long-term though, Future Library is the project most likely to be remembered across time itself. Indeed, it was deliberately created to be. And this year its longevity was ensured: Oslo's city leaders signed a contract formally committing them and their successors to protect the forest and library over the next 100 years.

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