Over the years, Boston artist Rosamond Purcell has photographed goliath beetles and translucent bats culled from the backrooms of natural history museums; a collection of teeth pulled by Peter the Great; moles flayed by naturalist Willem Cornelis van Heurn; and scores of worn and weathered objects, like the termite-eaten book and fish skeleton at right.

Purcell is fixed, in other words, on the state of decay. This bent is evident in her exceptional new volume, Bookworm, which recasts mangled texts as works of art. If Purcell seems always to look backward, she is also strikingly tuned to present-day obsessions—especially our fascination with repurposing. Aggregating curiosities and favorites, both our own and others', is a prominent feature of sites like del.icio.us, MySpace, and YouTube. The effect is part curation and part spectacle.