Question: What do bookworms eat, how did they live before books came about and what do they look like?

Hayley Evers-King answered on 21 Mar 2013:

Bookworm is actually a commonly used term for lots of different insects that have been found to eat books. They also eat other things though, so presumably they ate these things (plants mostly) before there were any books. They are mostly things like lice but cockroaches and beetles have also been found to eat books!