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How The Bookworm Got its Glasses, or a Natural History of Bookishness

Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) presented an engraving of a bookworm, a creature who devoured books and already figured the avid reader. The image launches a history of efforts to render visible—empirically verifiable—the bookworm. Repeatedly, the effort fails: Hooke is not the last to claim that he captured the critter, nor the last to mistake what he finds (his is a silverfish). Traces of devoured books appeared in every library, but what did devouring books look like? Unlike the scholastics before them, natural history’s proponents understood themselves as learning directly from nature, reading the bookworm as the sign of everything wrong about bookishness. Yet for centuries, empirical science could not nail down what (or if) a bookworm was, nor how it performed its work. Natural history thus shows itself as a sort of fable, creating the bookworm who destroys—and creates—the art of reading.