BOOKWORMS — BACK 367 



sects. There has been a tendency at times to record as pests of books 

 insects that harm books only under the most accidental of conditions. 

 Tliis may have resulted from the thorough disregard for the preserva- 

 tion of books and manuscripts known to exist quite generally even as 

 late as a hundred years ago, wliich sometimes resulted in the storing 

 of books in unsanitary surroundings. It is to be regretted that even 

 today the records of many colonial probate courts and the vital statis- 

 tics of many small towns and counties, to say nothing of State records 

 in some capitol buildings, are stored in basement rooms so poorly venti- 

 lated and insulated against moisture that instances of their injury, and 

 often of their utter destruction, by insects are by no means rare. The 

 late George S. Godard, for years librarian of the Connecticut State 

 Library, preached constantly to the town clerks and judges probate 

 the necessity of exercising great care to house public records where 

 insects, fire, and water could not harm them, and did more than any 

 other one person, in all probability, to bring the valuable town and 

 county records of Connecticut together in the well-guarded State 

 library. One has only to search for early records in many parts of 

 the United States to appreciate how many books of records of his- 

 torical value have already been destroyed by insects because of im- 

 proper housing. 



Blades, the Englishman, already referred to as writmg in England 

 in 1888, states: "Our cousins in the United States, so fortunate in 

 many things, seem very fortunate in this — their books are not attacked 

 by the 'worm' — at any rate, American writers say so." He even calls 

 attention to the statement in Ringway's Encyclopaedia of Printing 

 that in Philadelphia the slightest ravages of bookworms "are looked 

 upon as both curious and rare." Even if this were true in that day, 

 such a state of affairs has long since passed. In the colonial days of 

 this country books were not commonly possessed by the average house- 

 hold in the numbers possible today. In fact, books in many homes 

 were limited to the Bible, church hymnals, American printed histories, 

 and a few school books. These were given such hard usage that book- 

 worms made no headway in them, and the books were so valued that 

 they became a part of many an itemized inventory of a man's estate 

 and were mentioned in his will. 



Early writers have done much to instill into the public thought 

 the idea of mystery and elusiveness surrounding bookworms. Often 

 the discovery of a single living grub (pi. 12) has been thought 

 worthy of record. Too few writers have associated the bookworms 

 with very commonplace, cosmopolitan pests of articles of commerce 

 and of stored or refuse vegetable matter and animal matter or with 

 the wood of buildings. The cigarette beetle, responsible for thous- 

 ands of dollars worth of damage annually to raw and manufactured 



