Stack Dwellers

Photobash of images by David Kennedy and by Mike Erskine

Stack Dwellers

In long forgotten libraries where books are left to rot between the decrepit stacks of abandoned literature, these tiny inhabitants make their home. Feasting off of the processed wood pulp allows them to grow strong and tall where they'd otherwise struggle on natural wood, allowing their mycelium to spread throughout the millions of decaying pages.

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Citizens of Forgotten Books

Great civilizations of tiny book lovers rise and fall among the pages of lost novels; colonies of avid readers grow at an incredible pace among the paper-bound stories, consuming them faster than any human ever could. They grow in forgotten places on abandoned literature, in libraries closed by war, disaster, uprising, or politics. To human researchers and botanists, Stack Dwellers are known as "Little Readers", "Bookies", or "Rivals" -- because the humans wish they could keep up.
The mushrooms grow to a maximum height of roughly 1 inch, and there's usually around 20 mushrooms visible on one rotting book. The mycelium of these mushrooms spreads through the pages and onto neighbouring books, connecting them all together into one massive network of consumption; in an entire forgotten library, if left to decay, an outbreak of Stack Dwellers could reach upwards of 300,000 individual mushrooms. When a population grows that big, much of the library will be entirely consumed within two weeks -- after which all that's left behind are hardcovers and spores.
It's thought that Stack Dwellers were originally a type of wood-consuming fungus, thriving on felled and rotting trees, preferring the soft-wood of their decaying husks. They aren't strong enough to survive on the bark of healthy trees, and needed the dead wood to grow upon -- thus the preprocessed wood pulp of paper became an even easier substrate for them to thrive upon. As humanity wrote, printed, and forgot more and more books, Stack Dwellers as a sub-species were able to specialize and thrive in their new ecological niche. These days they are a popular, if slightly rare, species of mushrooms -- popular because they're cute, small, relatively harmless, and because most book fans feel a sort of kinship with these little readers.