Bibliophagous

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.

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.

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.