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Many book-lovers still enjoy the
tactile experience of flipping through actual pages rather than staring at e-reader. So for anyone whose twin
passions are reading and travel, book-themed hotels are as hot as the latest
best-seller, Forbes Travel
Guide says.
Hotel Monteleone, New
Orleans: Legend has it that while drinking in this French
Quarter hotel’s Carousel Bar and Lounge, the controversial and colorful Truman
Capote liked to brag that he was born in the Hotel Monteleone. The author of In
Cold Blood’s tale is partly true: His mother lived at the Monteleone and went
into labor there, but made it to a hospital in time for Capote’s birth. Plus,
the hotel not only housed writers, but played a role in some of their works:
Eudora Welty immortalized the hotel bar in The Purple Hat while Tennessee
Williams included the hotel as a setting in his play The Rose Tattoo.
Plaza Hotel, New York
City: This 20-story luxury hotel has been the setting for
numerous plays, movies and novels, but its most famous resident is children’s
book heroine Eloise. In Kay Thompson’s series of Eloise books published in the
1950s, the precocious six-year-old lived in the Plaza penthouse with her nanny,
a turtle and a pug dog. Fans of the books will get a giggle from Eloise at the
Plaza, a shop and reading room devoted to the iconic character.
Omni Parker House,
Boston: While heralded as the longest continuously running hotel
in America, the Parker House’s fame is inextricably linked to an illustrious
literary past. After opening in 1855, it became a gathering place for
philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, Atlantic Monthly editor James Russell Lowell,
novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and writer Oliver
Wendell Holmes. The literary luminaries’ monthly Saturday Club gatherings were
notable for rambunctious exchanges and impassioned readings. British novelist
Charles Dickens, who lived in a hotel apartment for two years, first recited “A
Christmas Carol” for members of the Saturday Club.
Four Seasons, Chicago: The
stylish hotel on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile provides a one-of-kind experience
for bookworms who like luxury with their literature. The sprawling Four Seasons’
Author Suite on the 46th floor contains a library overflowing with signed books
by dozens of authors, many of whom have stayed in the hotel. Books by Stephen
King, Anne Rice, Margaret Thatcher and Oliver Stone are just a few populating
the suite’s shelves. For young readers, the hotel offers the Bedtime Stories
Butler, who will visit the children with stories guaranteed to entertain them
as they drift off to sleep.
Heathman Hotel,
Portland, Oregon: In the Northwest, bookish clients
needn’t bring their own reading material, but can find everything they desire
in the hotel’s catalogued lending library. More than 3,000 books are displayed
in custom-made oak cases in the Mezzanine Library. Among the most-borrowed
books are Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, David Sedaris’ When You are
Engulfed in Flames and T.C. Boyle’s The Women. The hotel’s Books by Your
Bedside package is a book-lover’s delight, featuring a personal tour of the
library and the gift of a hardcover by the hotel’s most recent guest author.
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