True it is that all their black-letter comes from Europe, and,
having cost many dollars, is well looked after; but there they
have thousands of seventeenth and eighteenth century books,
in Roman type, printed in the States on genuine and wholesome paper,
and the worm is not particular, at least in this country,
about the type he eats through, if the paper is good.
Probably, therefore, the custodians of their old libraries could tell
a different tale, which makes it all the more amusing to find in the
excellent "Encyclopaedia of Printing,"[1] edited and printed by Ringwalt,
at Philadelphia, not only that the bookworm is a stranger there,
for personally he is unknown to most of us, but that his slightest
ravages are looked upon as both curious and rare. After quoting Dibdin,
with the addition of a few flights of imagination of his own,
Ringwalt states that this "paper-eating moth is supposed to have been
introduced into England in hogsleather binding from Holland." He then
ends with what, to anyone who has seen the ravages of the worm in hundreds
of books, must be charming in its native simplicity. "There is now,"
he states, evidently quoting it as a great curiosity, "there is now,
in a private library in Philadelphia, a book perforated by this insect.
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