accidentals and substantives

of the bibliophagi or book-eaters

bibliophage: biblio-. Prefix. Book: bibliophile.[From Greek biblion, book.];
-phage. Suffix. One that eats: macrophage. [From Greek -phagos, eating, from phagein, to eat.]

"Of the Bibliophagi or Book-Eaters" is the self-glossing title of chapter 9 of Holbrook Jackson's The Anatomy of Bibliomania (1930), a veritable baedeker to the symptoms and varieties of what is surely the best documented form of literary madness (bibliomania has spawned a vast and eccentric body of literature over the centuries). Appropriately, I picked up my copy a few years back from Blue Whale Books, a second-hand bookstore located in the downtown mall of Charlottesville, Virginia. C'ville is arguably the Bibliomaniac capital of the academic world, home to the Rare Book School, the U of Virginia, Studies in Bibliography, the Bibliographic Society of the U of Virginia, and some of the finest bibliographic minds of the last half century, not to mention the birthplace of the Hinman collator.

I'm particularly enchanted by the bibliophagi, whose regular ingestion of pulp and ink serves as a valuable reminder that there really are viable alternatives to the Atkins diet. Books are edible, Holbrook tells us, and "to serve their purpose must be eaten: you must eat the book, you must crush it, and cut it with your teeth and swallow it."

As every parent knows, books are one of the first solid foods a child acquires a taste for. On the authority of one Rosenbach, Holbrook speculates that the principle reason first editions of Alice in Wonderland are so scarce is that they've quite literally been eaten into extinction. The essayist Anne Fadiman provides corroborating evidence:

When my son was eight months old, he devoured literature. Presented with a book, he chewed it. A bit of Henry's DNA has been permanently incorporated into the warped pages of Goodnight Moon, and the missing corners of pages 3 and 8 suggest that a bit of Goodnight Moon has been permanently incorporated into Henry. ("A Glutton for Books," Civilization December 1996.)

Bibliophagia naturally lends itself to (ahem) sound-bites. According to Fadiman, Charles Lamb was partial to books containing traces of buttered muffins. More ecumenical in taste, Elizabeth Barrett Browning preferred to sample the full range of biblio fare, nibbling here and there "like some small nimble mouse between the ribs / Of a mastodon."

Bibliophagia appeals to the analytic bibliographer in me. When Matt and I stumbled across Eat This Book in a Washington DC toystore a year ago, I greedily snatched it up. Its edible pages ("wafer paper") can be made legible with the edible-ink pen (the "FooDoodler"). According to the FDA-mandated nutritional label on the inside cover, the wafer paper, which is made out of potato starch and turnip oil, contains only four calories per serving, while the FooDoodler comes in at an astounding zero calories. (Rice cake lovers, eat your heart out.)

Edible words are a frequent theme in the book arts. John Latham's notorious Still and Chew involved a complex production cycle of chewing, regurgitating, and recontextualizing: students were first invited to gnaw away at a library copy of Clement Greenberg's Art and Culture. The resultant masticated pulp (I'm reminded of an Asian delicacy that goes by the euphemistic name of "Swallow's Nest") was further broken down in an acid bath, then bottled, labeled ("Essence of Greenberg"), and finally returned to circulation in its altered state, much to the dismay of St. Martin's librarians, who, I gather, were at a loss as to how to catalog their prandial acquisition. (The story goes that Latham lost his job over the incident).

One of my favorite finds is Books2Eat, the international edible books festival. The website includes a photogallery guaranteed to make any red-blooded bibliophage salivate. (More grist for my Writing for Artists mill . . . )

So what about electronic books? Are they destined to be the offal of the book world? My prediction is that we'll see MIT launch an Edible Media program in the next decade. Hey, they already have tangible computing and wearable computing--can edible computing really be far behind?

Posted by karik at December 9, 2003 6:12 PM | TrackBack