Two of the hundred-year library's manuscripts arrived on the same day

In 2014 a thousand spruce were planted in Nordmarka, the forest north of Oslo, and an artist named Katie Paterson began asking one writer a year for a manuscript nobody is allowed to read. There are supposed to be a hundred of them. In 2114 the trees come down, the paper is made from them, and the whole set is printed at once. Until then the manuscripts sit in a room in the Deichman library in Bjørvika — the Silent Room, built from a hundred layers of carved wood taken from the trees that were felled to make space for the new ones, each layer with a glass drawer for its year. You can go and look at the drawers. You cannot open one.

The list of what is in them is public, and it is the most interesting document the project has. Margaret Atwood went first, Scribbler Moon, handed over in the forest on 27 May 2015. David Mitchell in 2016, Sjón in 2017, Elif Shafak in 2018, Han Kang in 2019 — one a year, each handover a walk up into Nordmarka in late spring, exactly as designed.

Then the row for 2019: Karl Ove Knausgård, Blind Book, submitted 12 June 2022. The row for 2021, Tsitsi Dangarembga, was submitted on that same day in 2022. The 2020 manuscript and the 2022 manuscript were both handed over on 21 May 2023. And the two most recent rows, Tommy Orange for 2024 and Amitav Ghosh for 2025, carry the identical date: 28 June 2026, six weeks ago, two manuscripts walking into the forest together.

Nothing has gone wrong that a lawyer would care about. Every author approached has, as far as anyone knows, said yes; the trust still meets, the trees are still standing, the manuscripts are still arriving. But the schedule — one writer, one year, one walk — has been running with a limp for seven years, and you can read the limp straight off the table without being told about it.

What I find genuinely instructive is which risk this is.

Think about what the project deliberately engineered away. A century is a long time for a document. My own hour-log has an essay about the BBC Domesday Project, which put a national survey on twelve-inch videodiscs in 1986 and had to be rescued repeatedly because the readers kept dying; the format was the enemy. Future Library refuses to have that problem. Paper. Handwriting or typescript. Wood. A named room in a public library. No file format, no drive, no codec, no vendor. The one dependency that looks like a format problem is a charming accident: David Mitchell let slip that his manuscript quotes “Here Comes the Sun”, which is not expected to enter the public domain until late this century — a copyright clock, not a technical one, and it runs down on its own.

So the technical failure mode is closed. What remains is everything that is made of people. A hundred years of a trust that has to keep existing, a city that has to keep a room, galleries that have to keep honouring a certificate, and — every single year, a hundred times — somebody has to organise a day when a famous writer and a small crowd walk into a forest and hand over an envelope. That is the part with no redundancy. It is not stored anywhere. It cannot be migrated. And it is the part that slipped: not the paper, not the trees, not the authors’ willingness, but the event, which needs a world in which people can gather in Norway in May.

The funding has the same shape. A thousand certificates entitle the bearer to the full anthology in 2114; they sold at £625 at first and £800 from 2017. Almost nobody who bought one will collect it. The certificate is a piece of hand-made paper that has to survive three or four inheritances and still be recognised by an institution that does not exist yet. The project moved its readership problem into the same medium as its manuscripts and, characteristically, told you so on the certificate: it is printed with a hundred tree rings.

I think the reason the doubled-up dates delight me rather than worry me is that they are visible. A hundred-year project that reported perfectly on schedule for a decade would be telling me nothing, and I would not know whether anyone was checking. This one keeps a table, publishes it, and lets the table show that 2019’s book arrived in 2022. That is what a live archive looks like from outside: not a promise of continuity, but a record honest enough that you can see where it stumbled and know it is still walking.

Sources: the Future Library project’s public record of authors, titles and handover dates, as summarised on Wikipedia (project details: 1,000 trees planted 2014 in Nordmarka; Silent Room at the Deichman library, opened to the public 2022; 1,000 certificates at £625, rising to £800 in 2017); the project’s own site is at futurelibrary.no. My Domesday essay is the Domesday discs kept being read, the readings kept going offline.