An Irishman's Diary

AMONG the free downloads on worldbookday.com this week was the reading of a text for young children entitled: “Do bugs have bottoms?” This is exactly the sort of question that intrigues the average six-year-old. And of course the answer is – PLOT SPOILER WARNING! – yes, all but the very oldest and most simple of animal species do have bottoms.

But I have to confess fretting about this very issue myself a few years ago, after retrieving a boxful of old books from a shed and discovering that a bookworm – or several bookworms – had been feasting on them in my absence.

Bookworms are not worms, as readers may know. The word is a popular misnomer for a range of insects, including the tiny common booklouse, which had probably been the guilty party in this case. The critter's latin name, liposcelis divinatorius, makes it sound a bit like a scholar – one with a doctorate in theology even. But there was nothing divine about its work.

The books damaged included my treasured school copy of FSL Lyons's Ireland Since the Famine;although happily, as journalists on a deadline often do, the louse had confined himself mainly to the index.

He burrowed in at the top of page 878 ("Ulster, cont'd") and from there dug a narrowing tunnel back as far as page 850, in the dense "Select Bibliography" section. Where, just before he would have had to negotiate his way through "Adams, M, Censorship: The Irish Experience", he finally decided he'd had enough.

On that mission alone, the insect must have eaten several times his weight in paper, which has a high-fibre content. And I did wonder where it all ended up. But so far as I could see, he at least had the manners to take it with him.

If we are applying anthropomorphic qualities to insects, by the way, these ones have marginally less in common with doctors of divinity than with substance-abusing delinquents. It’s not the paper they like eating, so much as certain moulds and other organic matter that grow on it. Some six-legged book consumers also enjoy the starch-based glues that were used on older volumes, a fact that once inspired Robert Burns to write a pleading verse to the pests: “Through and through th’inspir’d leaves,/Ye maggots, make your windings; But O respect his lordship’s taste,/And spare his golden bindings”. Apparently, Burns wrote that in a friend’s copy of the Bible, just the sort of place you’d expect a liposcelis divinatorius to be lurking.

THE COMINGof the e-book threatens to put the paper louse – among several other species – out of business. But the wonder is that nobody has yet invented an e-bookworm, designed to eat literature in electronic form. There must be plenty of old-school authors with the motivation to smuggle, say, a Trojan louse inside the gates of the Google book digitisation project and see what happens.

Yet so far, the nearest I’ve heard to such a thing is from the e-book providers themselves. As in 2009, when Amazon Kindle upset customers by remotely deleting two of George Orwell’s books from their e-readers, after realising that the publishers had not secured the rights.

Any margin notes made by users were left in a separate file, but were useless without the vanished (con)text. And maybe this wouldn't have seemed so sinister had the books not included 1984, Orwell's nightmare vision about a world in which a controlling elite have too much power over people's lives, including the ability to wipe memories.

The company refunded those affected and promised to change systems so that it wouldn’t happen again. But the incident did make you wonder about the wisdom of calling the first mass-produced e-reading device – of all things – Kindle. I mean, it’s a nice word. And in its figurative sense, meaning “to inflame” passion, imagination, etc, it’s an apt summary of what books can do.

The problem is the literal meaning. Consider, for example, Ulysses, which, decades before e-publishing, many of Joyce's detractors here and elsewhere wanted to see in kindle format. In fact, the urge to burn books continues to afflict people today, most recently that US pastor who threatened the

Koran. In short, with authors already nervous about the e-reader’s coming, the choice of name was hardly sensitive.

COME TOthink of it, it's not very sensitive of me to segue from that last paragraph into mentioning an event at Dublin's Tara Towers Hotel this weekend. They had a fire there only last week. But happily, no one was injured in it. And happily, the latest Dublin City Book Fair, to be held there tomorrow, is unaffected.

The fair is co-run by Barbara O’Connell, from Ballydehob, who tells me that despite the huge changes in publishing, demand for out-of-print and antiquarian books is as strong as ever. It’s just that, with so many shops priced out of the market by high rents and other problems, the books are getting harder to find. Hence the importance of the Dublin fair, now more than 30 years old.

As Barbara says, “E-books have their advantages, but nothing can beat the actual feel and look of a book, and the chance to chat with an experienced bookseller or fellow collector.” In any case, the fair takes place from 11am to 5pm, Sunday. All book lovers (with two legs or fewer) are welcome.