Proud to be a Librocubicularist

“Are you a librocubicularist?”

“Err… What?” I mumbled.

“A librocubicularist.” She said.

Still with that baffled look and sleepy eyes, I gaped at my friend. Last night, she had come over to my place to stay. While she was about to leave in the morning, she came to bid me goodbye, and as she entered my room, she smiled and pointed at piles of books around me, one of the books laying turned open on my chest.

“A… what?” I asked again.

She answered, and that’s when I came to know that people who had ‘the habit of reading in bed’ had a term to themselves. It’s a pity I didn’t know about it till then, perhaps because it hasn’t been officially included in a dictionary yet. But even the thought of such a word actually existing in English language super excites me. Thanks to internet, now I can even expand my imagination to actually have a cosy bed built with lots and lots of books stacked in shelves at one of its corners, for there is nothing undeniably pleasurable than seeking refuge into the world of redolent yellow pages and immersing in a realm beyond those words inked on them. Curled up in a blanket beside a lamp on a wintery night with a huge mug of hot coffee resting on the side table, believe me, there’s nothing better than reading your favourite thriller for hours together amidst this setting.

So, before I added this word to my vocabulary, I thought of surfing a bit about this on the internet. It turned out the term ‘librocubicularist’ has been made up of two words in Latin: ‘liber’ meaning book and ‘cubiculum’ meaning chamber meant for sleeping. The word was used for the first time almost a century ago by Christopher Morley in his ‘Haunted Bookshop’; it’s a pity that despite being so relevant and relatable, this term is still striving to find its place in the pages of a Merriam-Webster and Collins.

It is said, one should start cultivating reading habits in children at a very young age and I think there can be no better way to do so than making it a habit to read story books to the children at bedtime. This can be one of the ways for the parents and even elder siblings to spend quality time with the young ones and strengthen the bond between them. This would even give the children some amazing bedtime memories to hold on to that they would cherish when they grow up.

In today’s era, it has become difficult for individuals to take out time from their busy schedules and find that mental space to sit back and read, due to which reading time has been shrunk to bed time, and often they devote themselves to reading during weekends and holidays. Nevertheless, the happiness and thrill that one gets to experience from bedtime reading is unmatched. I’d rather like to have my dreams around the characters of those novels I have recently read than to have actual human beings pester into my dreams and turning them into nightmares.

So, if you are a bedtime reader too, then be proud to be called a librocubicularist!

- Saloni Gaba                                                Visit our site