Scottish Country Dance of the Day

“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.”

~  Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Today is the day for bibliophiles, lovers of books, also called "bookworms."  

The term bookworm originated with insects that bore through books.  Actual book-borers are uncommon. Two moths, the common clothes moth and the brown house moth, will attack cloth bindings. Leather-bound books attract various beetles.  The actual booklouse or paperlouse are tiny and feed on microscopic molds and other organic matter found in ill-maintained works, although they will also attack bindings and other book parts. 

The Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1907–1916, Augustine Birrell once recounted a situation in which a bookworm had eaten through to the 87th page of a fifteenth-century vellum book. 

The term "bibliosmia" refers to the love of the smell of old books (which is actually an aroma of molds and dusts and breakdown products from the book materials).  

And the Japanese word ‘tsundoku’ means ‘buying a bunch of books and then not getting round to reading them’. 

For more interesting book facts, click the painting by German painter and poet Carl Spitzweg,  1857, called "The Bookworm."