Avid readers have often been called bookworms or even book-eaters, and are sometimes said to devour an entire book in one sitting. In both Western and Eastern traditions, religious visions and ghostly legends survive in which important religious tomes were literally consumed.
Albrecht Dürer's groundbreaking illustrated Apocalypse stays close to its source material, the Book of Revelations. Its presumed writer, Saint John the Evangelist, is the visionary ingesting a simulacrum of his own Bible book: And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire: and he had in his hand a little book open: . . . And I took the little book out of the angel's hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter. And he said unto me, Thou must prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings. (KJV)
In contrast, the story of Tesso the Iron Rat was a mystic Japanese narrative based on the real threat of vermin damage to religious scrolls. Once the Abbot of the Buddhist Miidera temple, Tesso returned after his death in 1084 A.D. as a giant rat, and incited other vermin to shred the sacred texts at a rival temple. Yoshitoshi's late nineteenth-century color woodcut includes illusionistic distressed edges, as if an uncontrollable horde of rats had nibbled it too.
- Albrecht Dürer, St. John Devouring the Book, from The Apocalypse, c. 1496–98, published 1511. (Prints and Drawings) (From late December) Albrecht Dürer, The Apocalypse: facsimile of the German first edition from 1498 "The Revelation of St. John." New York: Prestel, c. 1999. (Ryerson and Burnham Libraries)
- John Stevenson, Yoshitoshi's thirty-six ghosts. New York: Weatherhill/Blue Tiger, 1983. (Ryerson and Burnham Libraries)