When Bookworms Cause Damage: The Silent Erosion of Knowledge

The stability of human knowledge has always depended upon fragile substrates. For most of recorded history, texts circulated not as abstract digital entities but material objects such as codices, scrolls, scripts are vulnerable to the entropic forces of time. Among the most persistent threats to this material heritage is the activity of so-called bookworms, a colloquial umbrella term for a variety of insects whose feeding or burrowing damages books.