That’s what we call a long-term project
You’ll have to wait until 2114 to see works in the ‘Future Library’
Some authors crave public adulation. Others are content to wait for it — even if it takes 100 years.
David Mitchell, the British author of the 2004 novel Cloud Atlas, is the second major writer to submit a manuscript to the Future Library Project, which will delay its publication until the trees in a Norwegian forest are mature enough to make the paper it’ll be printed on, a century from now.
Mitchell, 47, won’t be alive when the work comes out in 98 years. Neither will Canada’s Margaret Atwood, 76, who gave a manuscript called Scribbler Moonto the project last year.
The project, which is the brainchild of Scottish artist Katie Paterson, began in the summer of 2014 when 1,000 trees were planted in Nordmarka, Norway, near the country’s capital, Oslo.
The city of Oslo and a public corporation jointly sponsored the project and paid for the trees to be planted and for a special room in the city’s Deichman Public Library where the manuscripts will be displayed.
Paterson’s plan is for an “outstanding” author to do the same — providing both a print and digital copy of a new book — every year until 2114.
“I was simply sketching tree rings and I had a vision I guess. Tree rings, chapter, paper, books, future, trees, forest, writers — kind of all like that. And I imagined planting a forest that would grow a book over time,” Paterson told CBC Radio.
Atwood has described the concept as “delicious.” “You don’t have to be around for the part when if it’s a good review the publisher takes credit for it and if it’s a bad review, it’s all your fault,” she said in an interview.
Mitchell, whose novel is called From Me Flows What You Call Time, is similarly enchanted.
“It’s trees, it’s books, it’s a circle, it’s pulp, it’s organic matter turning into (paper). And then the words get printed on them. I love that,” Mitchell said.
The participating authors aren’t the only ones embracing the concept of delayed gratification.
Actor-director John Malkovich and director Robert Rodriguez recently released a teaser trailer for their film 100 Years — the Movie You’ll Never See, in which the actor said, with mock gravity, “Imagine the future.”
Inspired by a fine bottle of Louis XIII cognac, which the LCBO website said retails for $3,100 for a 700 ml bottle and is made from cognacs that have been aged for100 years, the film has been sealed in a vault and will not be screened until Nov. 18, 2115.
And in the marketing coup of the decade, hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan produced a single copy of an album entitled Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, which the group announced it would sell to the highest bidder.
Along came hedge-fund entrepreneur Martin Shkreli, who paid $2 million for the album last November.
Shkreli had become the face of corporate greed and one of the most hated human beings on the planet for buying a pharmaceutical company and hiking the price of a life-saving drug by 5,000 per cent.
Shkreli bragged he bought the al- bum to “keep it from the people” and hasn’t even listened to all of its 31 tracks.
Last December, a month after his purchase, Shkreli was arrested by the FBI and charged with seven securities fraud-related charges. While each charges carries a maximum penalty of five years, U.S. prosecutors have recently laid an additional fraud charge and have indicated more are possible. A guilty verdict on all of them could keep Shkreli in jail for 100 years.