The bookworm actually only ate 300 pages! While your first instinct might be to multiply 300 pages by 3 volumes to get 900 pages, the trick lies entirely in how books sit on a shelf:
- Locate Page 1 of Volume 1: Take any book off your shelf and hold it ready to read. The front cover is on the front, and the spine is on the left. When you place that book back on the shelf with the spine facing you, the front cover (and page 1) is actually on the right side of that book, touching Volume 2.
- Locate the Last Page of Volume 3: Similarly, the back cover (and the last page) of a book on a shelf sits on the left side of that book, also touching Volume 2.
- Trace the Worm’s Path: The bookworm starts at page 1 of Volume 1 (the right side of the book). It chews immediately through the front cover, goes entirely through the middle book (all 300 pages of Volume 2), chews through the back cover of Volume 3, and stops right as it hits the last page of Volume 3.
Because it started on the inside edge of Volume 1 and stopped on the inside edge of Volume 3, it never touched a single page inside Volume 1 or Volume 3!
