The Bookworm · 4:14am Apr 20th, 2019
The Bookworm
The type specimen of the kingdom of literature, bookworms were thought for many centuries to be merely magical artifacts, no more sentient than a clock or a flame. Certainly, the bookworm shares none of the attributes commonly associated with living animals – or, for that matter, plants and fungi. Aristrottle neglected to mention bookworms entirely in his History of Animals, though his student Antigaiter listed several supposed (and, as far as we know, ineffective) remedies for the pests in his famous treatise Epistemics.
The bookworm was the first – and for centuries the only – textual lifeform. Its body consists solely of the printed word “bookworm,” whose characters migrate slowly through written material, devouring letters and leaving behind a blank trail through the text. Given a few hours, a bookworm will erase a whole page. With a few months or years of solitude, undisturbed on the shelf of a library or other collection, a single bookworm can reduce an entire volume to blank vellum.
Prior to the advent of modern mass-printing, bookworms were a scourge of scholars and librarians. Rare volumes and one-of-a-kind books had to be zealously guarded from the depredations of a bookworm, kept in sealed wood cases to prevent any contact with infested tomes. Elaborate binding and gluing techniques were developed to slow the spread of bookworms between covers, and schools sometimes resorted to more drastic measures. Peony wrote of one student who, upon discovering an infested textbook, burned it and every other book on the same shelf. The last known copy of Instantiation’s Being and Non-Being is believed to have been lost when a cautious curator, having already witnessed the loss of several other scholars who attempted to read the text in search of the bookworm, simply consigned it to the fire.
Modern scholars, blessed with the gift of the printing press, have found more temperate means of eliminating bookworms. Upon discovering that a text has been infested – almost always immediately obvious upon opening it and finding blank pages or a trail of missing letters – one simply searches through the book until they find the bookworm, and cross through it with a razor blade. This kills the bookworm and prevents any further damage to the text, though of course any previous damage remains.
During the Romantic period of the 8th Century, bookworms were a popular device in occult fiction, transforming into terrifying monsters as a result of devouring spellbooks or journals, which gave them power over the pony who wrote them. These stories are without merit, and Gold Dust dismisses them as a “manifestation of moral panic among the higher classes coinciding with the advent of widespread earth pony literacy.”
See also: the Common Penpal
Stop teasing us with blog stories and make full stories out of this sheananigans!
5046713
No! You can't make me!
Nice. :D
Does this mean the Borges collab is truly dead?
5046718
No, horizon is just real busy right now, and i felt like sharing this.
Nice
Also lovely! I’m really enjoying these bibliographic critters, given I have plans for a dnd dungeon that is an extra-dimensional library.
A subspecies is the domesticated Booooookworm. It has been compared to the domesticated silk moth, though the two species are of course entirely unrelated. Believed to have originated as a non lethal mutation caused by infection by the Myspelling Vyrus, the Booooookworm is similar to its wild cousins but is unable to effectively spread between pages or books without Pony assistance. It also continually grows, beginning with six Os and extending to twelve before it reproduces by binary fission.
The Booooookworm was once prized by scholars as an effective way to reuse parchment or vellum without resorting to laborious production techniques or damaging and time consuming scraping. Indeed it was once common for a scholar to keep one on a scrap almost as a pet, scribbling occasional words to feed it and carefully migrating it onto a page to be cleaned when needed. Some would even draw elaborate mazes and labyrinths for them, believing that they were happier existing in an environment with clear lines to travel between. It is, perhaps, something of a loss that the mass production of paper has rendered such charming techniques obsolete outside of a few select applications and eccentrics.
5046719
That's good to know!
I like the whole project, and I hope it comes to fruition. This little piece reminded me of why I participated.
Thanks for sharing!
5046719
That's good to know. I was starting to get worried.
As a bibliophile myself, I want one!
Heh, pretty neat. Reminds me of The Raw Shark Texts (which you should totally read if you haven't before); the protagonist is being hunted by the concept of a shark, and it swims through information in pursuit of him. Including the book's own text, at times.
5046732
I want a little pet booooookworm for all the forms and paperwork I have to generate at $WORK