In Bookworm, Purcell manipulates objects more than she has in her earlier collections. Most of the objects come from Owl's Head and are owned by the artist, so there is no museum curator or institutional presence intervening between Purcell and her specimen.

For the collage at right, Purcell worked with a biologist who maintained a termite colony and who helped her to set the insects loose on pages of anatomical and architectural text. She then assembled the partially eaten pages with playing cards and fossil fragments from Madagascar.