It stands to reason that a head-louse lives on heads, a plant-louse lives on plants, a bark-louse lives on tree trunks, so a proof-louse occurs on proofs.
Hopefully not a sign of a lousy book.
This is what crawled over the photocopy proofs of House Guests, House Pests whilst I was reading through them on holiday last week. It’s one of the book/bark/flour lice (order Psocoptera), something like Liposcelis which is often found damaging paper, or in stored food. We have them living in various cupboards in the kitchen and that’s probably where this one came from originally.
However, it had been on a long journey, because it crawled out of the proofs in Strobl, in the Austrian Alps, after I took them from the brown envelop that I had been carrying in my small hand-luggage back-pack.
I suspect my bag, long used on family trips to hold packed lunches, savoury snacks, sweets, and various other food items frequently spilled, has its own internal ecosystem and that there is actually a thriving colony of Liposcelis living at the bottom of it.
I’ll give it a bit of a shake-out before I use it next.
Richard Jones
Bugman Jones 
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