I’m writing this from one of the emerald velvet couches in the Duc de Morny Library of La Réserve Paris. The Champs-Elysée is only one block away, but you’d never guess it within this tranquil time-capsule – between fluted columns and marble fireplaces, rare early editions line the walls, the names of Diderot and Voltaire glinting gold from leather-bound spines.
Breaking for a thé vert and pistachio madeleines (if it was a little later, I’d take a tipple from the honesty bar), a 1911 French translation of One Thousand and One Nights offers a welcome relief from my laptop screen. Although I can’t read more than a few words, it’s a pleasure to lift the smooth grain of the cover, revealing marbled endpapers, and flick through thick, coffee-coloured pages that crackle as they’re turned. They don’t make ‘em like this anymore.
Perhaps it’s the #booktok effect, or the rise in travellers demanding work-friendly hangouts during their stays, but bibliophilia is booming in boutique hotels. Perhaps I’m not the only one craving paper.
While La Reserve’s 3,000 volumes were hand-picked by hotel-owner Michel Reybier and interior designer Jacques Garcia, some properties are finessing their shelves with the help of specialist book curation agencies, like Ultimate Library. The collection at Cambridge’s University Arms was curated by Mayfair bookseller (and royal warrant holder) Heywood Hill.
A hotel library in a scholarly spot like Cambridge isn’t all that surprising, but less obvious locales are getting in on the act, too. Take the Betsy South Beach. Should you tire of Miami’s pool parties and boozy brunches, there are 10,000 books spread between the hotel’s writer’s room and bedrooms to delve into.
And this isn’t just window-dressing; the hotel’s writer-in-residence programme has to date supported over 1,000 creatives, who receive free desk-space and accommodation in exchange for hosting a community event and donating one of their own works.
Unlike an academic or civic library, the hotel version isn’t so hushed and reverent; you can have cocktails and a chat against these bookish backdrops.
Saint James Paris’ Library Bar harks back to the building’s former incarnation as the Theirs Foundation, a boarding house for gifted pupils, but these days, guests relaxing in its rarefied Relais & Chateaux surrounds needn’t be so studious – I eschewed Rousseau in favour of sipping a smooth, hazelnut-laced Pere e Niccole, perched on one of Laura Gonzalez’s chintzy-chic bar stools.
Nor must the hotel library be some arcane, wood-panelled space dedicated to the greats. Books at the Standard, London, reflect the brand’s youthful, playful identity as well as the Brutalist building in which it sits (formerly home to Camden Council’s offices).
Carrie Maclennan, the hotel’s very own ‘concept librarian’, has grouped offbeat Seventies and Eighties non-fiction titles into tongue-in-cheek categories: Order and Chaos sit side-by-side, as do Environmental Science and Despair, Politics and Tragedy.
Its modular shelves are straight out of the provincial lending libraries of my childhood (albeit those lacked the Standard’s Saporiti leather sofas and blown-glass pendant lamps), and each spine is labelled with faux Dewey decimal numbering printed in house.
If the hotel librarian’s job is to introduce you to something you’d never normally pick up – but might have fun discovering – then hats off to Maclennan for sourcing the likes of John Travolta: Staying Fit! (1984) and All About Goats by Lois Hetherington (1980).
Another property opting for edgier aesthetics and readable tomes is Stamba Hotel in Tblisi, Georgia – itself a converted publishing house. Bathed in red neon, the bookstacks are flanked by exposed brick walls and concrete columns.
Some take a patriotic tack: Buenos Aires’s Hotel Pulitzer pays homage to Argentina’s literary heritage with editions by Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar. Vasari’s Lives of the Artists is among the paeans to Florentines past that line the mahogany shelves of Il Salviatino’s in-house biblioteca. Eclectic references to the Big Smoke suffuse NoMad London’s collection, whether it’s a glossy coffee-table book on TFL posters, the complete works of Dickens, or a hard-boiled chronicle of the Krays.
I’m yet to see any of Philip Larkin’s poetry lying around these bibliophile lobby-bars, but a line from Mr Bleaney springs to mind: ‘No room for books or bags’. It speaks of a displaced, rootless existence, whereas a well-stocked shelf confers a sense of permanence, curiosity and character.
Don’t we all secretly peek at the bookshelves when visiting someone’s house, as if it’ll give us a glimpse into their true nature? Doesn’t a home without any book – to politely paraphrase John Waters – seem a little disconcerting, soulless even? Well, hotels are no different.
Even when they’re the handiwork of a self-styled consultant, and maybe only a minority of guests actually read their tomes cover-to-cover, these collections are a smart stroke of identity-building on the hotelier’s part. As for their itinerant visitors, the hotel library makes for a comforting, analogue space in which to think, write, correspond or simply be.
Feeling inspired? Why not take a literary tour of Dublin
Estella Shardlow is a freelance travel writer and editor whose work has appeared in The Times, Suitcase, The Telegraph, Food & Travel and more.