Wormholes

Some 380,000 species of beetles exist around the world, with over 8,100 of them present in Canada. Any number of these insects lay eggs that turn into larvae that bore into book bindings and spines, nibbling their way through paper and destroying collections. And when they do that, we call them “bookworms.”

While Aristotle described a tiny creature occasionally encountered in codices —“like a scorpion without a tail, exceedingly small”— the beetles, termites, and moths that can wreak havoc on the printed page didn’t merit much attention until there were . . . well, printed pages. Bookworms do not eat vellum manuscripts, and so it wasn’t until the early modern period that entomological texts began to classify “the silver-colour’d Book-worm,” as George Adams put it in Micrographia illustrata, “often found scudding among Books and Papers.”

In 1667, the natural philosopher and jack of all trades Robert Hooke likened bookworms to “the teeth of Time.�...