A few times I’ve come across a small, grey desiccated lump at the end of one of these tracks:Ī quick look at Wikipedia tells me that “bookworm” is a generic term for any insect that bores through books. Or they carve meandering tracks across pages, obscuring text, weakening bindings, and leaving the paper vulnerable to tearing. They tunnel through books, at times all the way from front cover to back, leaving holes on every page. However, there is actually nothing amusing about the damage that bookworms cause. The pictures I showed my daughter were of bookworm tracks that resembled a rabbit and an ostrich.

So I told my daughter that unfortunately, as anyone who works with old books knows, the answer is, “Yes, bookworms are a real thing.” When I recently showed my teenage daughter a couple of pictures of bookworm tracks in books from the Sutro Library vault, she exclaimed, “Wait, bookworms are a real thing?” I realized then that the cute animations popularizing bookworm-themed games and the affectionate nickname we might give to someone who is, yet again, lost in a novel, have superseded the reality of these insidious little borers. It didn’t occur to me that some people, perhaps even most people, who hear the term “bookworm” think it is only a metaphor for someone who reads voraciously.

Real bookworm