bibliophagous

comparative more bibliophagous · superlative most bibliophagous

1. Book-consuming.

   Two types of biological degradative agencies are recognised: bibliophagous insects and micro-organisms.[…]More than a hundred book-consuming insect species are known, and they can be regular or occasional residents.

   2011, Elisabetta Princi, “3. Why Does Paper Degrade?”, in Handbook of Polymers in Paper Conservation, iSmithers, →ISBN, page 93

   2 more examples

   We have, in this work of fiction, a copious display of the results of great experience, conveyed in a series of incidents as varied and as animated as the most restless novel-reader can desire to appease his bibliophagous craving withal.

   1830, The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, page 98, column 1

   The modernist rat provokes such oppositions only to confound them. Popping up irrepressibly in modern texts, the rat signals the breakdown of boundaries, at once calamitous and liberating. Traditionally feared as a parasite on literature, a bibliophagous menace to the authority of the book, the rat represents the forces of decomposition endemic to the work of composition.

   2010, Maud Ellmann, “Chapter 2. The modernist rat”, in The Nets of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 14