In the summer of 2014, Scottish artist Katie Paterson walked deep into a Norwegian wood and, with a little help from local foresters, planted a thousand spruce saplings.

These ribbon-tagged trees, hidden in the forest of Nordmarka, an hour outside Oslo, are destined for something very special.

The trees are intended to grow for 100 years, until 2114, when they will be felled, pulped, pressed and dyed and turned into paper.

The paper will be used to print 100 previously unpublished books by 100 different authors, including Margaret Atwood, the Canadian writer behind The Handmaid's Tale.

A signpost shows the way to the forest which is growing trees to be made into books for the Future Library. ( Supplied: Katie Paterson/Future Library )

The forest is an artwork in progress, the initial stage of Paterson's Future Library.

"The idea is that one author per year is commissioned specifically to write a new piece of work for the forest, with the knowledge that nobody is going to read it until the trees are fully grown," the artist tells RN's Late Night Live.

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The idea of preserving a "time capsule" of books came to her while she was sitting on a train, doodling tree rings in a notebook.

"When I looked at the tree rings," she says, "I saw books and chapters and paper and then imagined very quickly these trees growing, a whole forest of trees growing to become a book over time."

Out-of-the-box logistics

Paterson has worked on several big-scale artworks over the years, mapping all the dead stars known to humanity and broadcasting the sounds of a melting glacier direct to people's mobile phones.

But the 38-year-old artist describes the Future Library as one of her most ambitious projects to date.

Rather than planting a forest in her native Scotland, Paterson took the concept to Oslo.

Scottish artist Katie Paterson says a doodle of a tree ring inspired her to create the Future Library in Oslo. ( Supplied: Kristin von Hirsch/ Bjørvika Utvikling )

She pitched the idea at Slow Days, an event designed to brainstorm ideas for a public art program for the city's new harbour precinct.

The conference was organised by Anne-Beate Hovind, who became the commissioner and curator of the Framstidsbiblioteket (as the Future Library is locally known.)

Ms Hovind admits that when Paterson approached her with the concept of an artwork spanning a century, her initial reaction was "sheer panic".

"Katie's idea was totally out of the box, time-wise, place-wise, height-wise, imagination-wise," she says.

"But I got on with it and started trying to make it happen."

Ms Hovind began working with politicians, town planners and local foresters in Oslo to secure funding and assure the 100-year lifespan of the trees.

Using her many years' experience as an urban planner, she persuaded local authorities to donate the forest plot in the Nordmarka wood, gained funding from a Norwegian property developer and assembled a team of volunteer foresters to tend the trees.

Margaret Atwood was the first author invited to write a book for the Future Library. ( Supplied: Kristin von Hirsch/Bjørvika Utvikling )

She also helped to set up the Future Library Trust, a group of publishers and literary specialists who meet every year with Paterson to discuss which authors should be invited to write for the library.

The authors have a lot of freedom when it comes to writing works for the Future Library.

They can submit a work of fiction or non-fiction, a biography or a poem, writing in any language and to any length they choose.

"The only thing we stipulate is 'no drawings, only words,'" Ms Hovind says.

"All our authors are sworn to total secrecy. Their manuscripts have to be unpublished and unread by anyone but them."

Books that slumber for 100 years

The first author the Future Library Trust approached was Booker Prize-winning author Atwood, one of Paterson's "absolute heroes".

"We got a phenomenal response from Margaret," Paterson says.

"She responded to our letter not only agreeing to write for the Future Library, but giving us advice about what kind of trees to plant and how to plant them because she grew up in a forest herself."

Atwood's father, Carl Edmund Atwood, was an entomologist, so as a child she spent much of her free time roaming around the backwoods of northern Quebec.

Despite the dystopian themes in much of her work, Atwood was hugely enthusiastic about the Future Library, saying there was "something magical" about the idea of books slumbering like Sleeping Beauty for 100 years, and "then they'll wake up, come to life again".

Since Atwood penned the Future Library's first tome, Scribbler Moon, in 2014, five other authors have come on board: David Mitchell of Cloud Atlas fame, Turkish writer Elif Shafak, Icelandic author and musician Sjón, South Korean author Han Kang and Karl Ove Knausgård, the first Norwegian writer to contribute to the project.

Novelist Elif Shafak gives a speech in the forest as she hands over her manuscript to the Future Library. ( Supplied: Kristin von Hirsch/Bjørvika Utvikling )

Mitchell called the project "a vote of confidence for the future" and Shafak escribed the experience of writing for the Future Library as being "like writing a letter now and leaving it in a river".

"You don't know where it will go or who will read it — you just believe in the flow of time," she has said.

The global book vault

Once the Future Library collection is completed in 2114, the plan is to print 3,000 copies of all 100 texts.

Until then, the manuscripts are to be stored in a special Silent Room in Oslo's new public library (slated to open in 2020).

Visitors will be able to catch a tantalising glimpse of the author's name and the book's title — but never access to the full text.

The manuscripts of the 100 books written for the Future Library will be stored in the Silent Room in Oslo's new public library. ( Supplied: Atelier Oslo and Lund Hagem )

Paterson believes Norway, already the home of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, is a fitting place for the Future Library.

"Norwegians have a long-term view on things, on nature, technology, myth and storytelling," she says.

"The Global Seed Vault guarantees the protection and safeguarding of the world's collection of plant life in one place; the Future Library is bringing together authors' voices and words and safeguarding those for the future as well."

She admits that there are "many unknowns" in the world right now.

"We're in a total climate crisis, in a catastrophic moment, and so we can't predict entirely that the forest will still be there in a hundred years, but we have to do everything we can to ensure that it will be," she says.

As for reading the books in what has been described as "the most secretive library in the world," Paterson is resigned to the fact that she will never know what the authors she commissioned wrote.

She says it is enough for her that her two-year-old son might live long enough to read the future tomes.

In the meantime, she is encouraging those who are eager to pass on reading rights to their descendants to purchase a Future Library certificate which entitles its bearer to a printed anthology of the books when they are finally published in 2114.

The limited-edition certificates, hand-made by Paterson and sold at selected art galleries worldwide, cost around $1,500.

She is confident that printed books will not have been totally replaced by futuristic smart devices in 2114.

"I think it was Umberto Eco who described the book as being like the wheel. It's so perfect in its being that it can't be improved upon," she says.

"Part of me hopes that it will be exactly the same, in a way; people will be reading on printed paper, but they might also be reading in ways we can't conceive of now."