Thread by @dbellingradt

Robert Hooke's "Micrographia" of 1665 invented and fueled the myth of the existance of a paper eating "book-worm". According to the inventor, the worm was "silver-shining" and "eats holes through leaves and covers" (p. 208).

diglib.hab.de/drucke/38-2-ph…

#bookhistory #bookworms

I am curious to learn if the non-Western book cultures invented the bookworm (or similar small animals eating books or paper/parchment etc.) as well? #globalbookhistory to the rescue. Thanks for spreading the word.

What kind of insect Hooke found around 1665 in one of his damaged books remaines unclear. However, Hooke's invention still fuels the idea of a living book thread, an ememy. "This Animal probably feeds upon the Paper and covers of Books, and perforates in them several small ...

... round holes, finding, perhaps, a convenient nourishment in those husks of Hemp and Flax, which have pass'd through so many scourings, washings, dressings and dryings, as the parts of older Paper must necessarily have suffer'd; ...

... the digestive faculty, it seems, of these little creatures being able yet further to work upon those stubborn parts, and reduce them into another form."

The invention of the bookworm is connected to the materialty of the book and to the contemporary reading consumerism.

In 1880, William Blades picked up the idea of bookworms and published his widely translated "The Enemies of Books". Blades gave reference to Hooke's publication of 1665. The idea now had its first major media echo.

It was Blades who made this idea popular in a Western context. Here is one example of Blades' book showing how a bookworm had skillfully killed/damanged a printed leave from a Caxton publication.

The idea of a paper and book eating insect made eventually its way into the fauna. Here is the "booklouse Liposcelis". However, these booklice mainly attack grain stores, not paper or books.

So what exactly is tunneling through books leaving holes when it is not a bookworm?

"Bookworms" are insects, and some of them are hungry all over the world. In fact, it is larvae damage what we see.

https://twitter.com/erik_kwakkel/status/715641119271428097

#bookhistory

Some of them are even eating through leather, as @erik_kwakkel and others have shown:

https://twitter.com/erik_kwakkel/status/1101527580363042816

Larvae of various types of insects are chewing through books.

To sum up, and as insects are hungry all over the world and existed long before paper books became a thing, why is the idea of the bookworm invented in Europe in the seventeenth-century? Is this Western narrative even true, #globalbookhistory?