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.  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.”  Oh! lucky Philadelphians! who can boast of possessing the oldest library in the States, but must ask leave of a private collector if they wish to see the one wormhole in the whole city!

[1] “American Encyclopaedia of Printing”:  by Luther Ringwalt. 8vo.  Philadelphia, 1871.

CHAPTER VII.

OTHER VERMIN.

BESIDES the worm I do not think there is any insect enemy of books worth description.  The domestic black-beetle, or cockroach, is far too modern an introduction to our country to have done much harm, though he will sometimes nibble the binding of books, especially if they rest upon the floor.

Not so fortunate, however, are our American cousins, for in the “Library Journal” for September, 1879, Mr. Weston Flint gives an account of a dreadful little pest which commits great havoc upon the cloth bindings of the New York libraries.  It is a small black-beetle or cockroach, called by scientists “Blatta germanica” and by others the “Croton Bug.”  Unlike our household pest, whose home is the kitchen, and whose bashfulness loves secrecy and the dark hours, this misgrown flat species, of which it would take two to make a medium-sized English specimen, has gained in impudence what it has lost in size, fearing neither light nor noise, neither man nor beast.  In the old English Bible of 1551, we read in Psalm xci, 5, “Thou shalt not nede to be afraied for eny Bugges by night.”  This verse falls unheeded on