This is 2114 #FutureLibrary

This is 2114

No less than a stencilled hand, prehistoric, waving from a cave wall in the South of France - from a time older than France - the names displayed in this room, and the stories printed on those erstwhile trees, are a greeting from across the years. So many love letters to the future.

I sat back in my chair and, with a percussive tapping, saved my post. I navigated - tap tap - to the blog's homepage and regarded this new entry mirrored on the wallscreen, savouring the satisfaction each new addition brings. I had been considering changing my profile pic; maybe a selfie from the trip to complement my piece on the Future Library, but a friend had produced it whose aspirations were at that time set on graphic design. The logo featured the words Scribbler Moon , in my own handwriting, cradled in the sharp sweep of a sickle moon. I ended up leaving it. I'm rather fond of it, and besides, replacing it would only end up pissing them off.

Scribbler Moon. I had thought that it was witty at first, but was now fretting it was just a bit naff. A bit of a moot point at this stage, though; whilst I was hardly setting the world alight - definitely not what you would call a celebrity blogger - I had a decent enough following of LitNerds, and the beginnings of a brand. You definitely don't want to interfere with a brand once it gets going. Either way... Moon is actually just my surname (my parents were major throwbacks). Still, whilst its mention in public often has me cringing, my face contorting in an effort to physically push the embarrassment away, I could never really hate it, as it reminds me so much of my parents. They coined the name after all, and as a result I never had to share it with anyone else, not even a single grandparent. The trend for picking a new surname for your new family had been growing for a while, and it was particularly en vogue around the time of Mum and Dad's wedding. Old romantics that they were, the two of them felt compelled to enjoy marital bliss united under a single family name. The problem was that Mum was too staunchly feminist to take my father's name, and Dad too stubborn to take Mum's. Since they found hyphenation too "spießig" and portmanteaus grating on the ear, they settled on Moon, inheriting, apparently, more than a little of their outlook on life from those hippy groups of the 1960s. It's funny, I can remember even when I was little how my mother's friends would laugh about this insistence on being so "ostentatiously feminist" (it was already considered passé). They called Mum old-fashioned; Mum called them complacent.

Maybe I can cope with Scribbler Moon as my blog alias after all. I'm proud to be a scribbler, wilfully determined to persist in writing anything important first by hand, long after penmanship was abandoned as part of the school curriculum. I suppose it stems from a sort of nostalgia, a slightly pretentious affinity for the obsolete; I'd probably own a bloody typewriter if those that were left hadn't all ended up being used in conceptual art installations over the past century. I flicked absently through the book from which I had copied my final draft, contemplating the insectile marks huddling in dense groupings amongst the pages. It was an old paperback - very old, I noticed, as I reached the imprint page - not much younger than the Future Library itself. Around the printed text, there was not an inch of blank space free from an exuberance of handwriting. Cramped lines of past thoughts squeezed themselves along the tops of pages, flowing down the margins and around paragraphs like rain running down the uneven brick walls of an old house. The most overpopulated sections were the chapter breaks, where the smallest writing wove in and around and above itself. These were rare, open clearings in the dense wood of text where I could luxuriate in the space, filling it to the brim with words.

These dog-eared paperbacks, which I have devoured time and again, and to which I have added my own humble contributions, came time from my grandfather. Or more specifically those slightly damp boxes in his garage. They came from a time when print books were still mass-produced, churned out to populate 3for2 tables in the shops that sold them, when one could go to a charity shop and pick them up for pence (I understood from Grandad's tone that this was a paltry amount in old money). He had been somewhat of a bibliophile himself, although I found it hard to understand his neglectful attitude towards storing them. When his Parkinson's progressed to the point where he could no longer read them himself, he was thrilled to be able to pass them on to me.