There is something special about books and hotels. You pick up your keycard and slip between the luxury linen with a paperback, knowing you have nothing but the possibility of some room service to disturb you. You can have an affair with something you’ve never read before, or fall in love with a favourite all over again. You don’t even have to clear up after yourself.
For serious book lovers, there’s nothing better than leaving the comfortable room where you sit and read all day and travelling to another, different, room where you sit and read all day. But this one has a minibar.
There are a wealth of interesting, inspiring and iconic lodgings for the literary passionate all across Europe. Hotels have always offered inspiration for readers and writers, and whether you want to stay in the places where great authors worked, be walled up in rooms that are literally made from books, walk in the footsteps of your favourite fictional characters or find a stimulating spot to put pen to paper yourself, there are more than just a few novel locations to tempt you.
ACCOMMODATION FOR AUTHORS
“It’s funny what a wonderful gentility you get in the bar of a big hotel.” Ernest Hemingway, as this quote from The Sun Also Rises shows, had a soft spot for hotels in general, and Madrid’s Westin Palace in particular. But Papa wasn’t the only literary luminary to sample the delights of Spain’s oldest luxury hotel. It has hosted such notables as Federico García Lorca, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez and Julio Camba.
Hemingway was also a fan of the Hôtel du Cap on the French Riviera, built in 1869 primarily to help writers seek inspiration. One inspired soul was F Scott Fitzgerald, who immortalised it as the Hôtel des Étrangers in Tender is the Night, even handily providing directions when he wrote “On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about halfway between Marseille and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-coloured hotel.”
The Hotel Le Swann in Paris’s 8th Arrondissement was established “… with the aim of raising awareness and inspiring a love of Marcel Proust,” with the 80 rooms named after different characters from In Search of Lost Time. Madeleines not included.
At the Hotel Regina in Vienna you can stay in the Stefan Zweig Suite, the favoured room of the great author whose work inspired Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Heinrich Böll was in the lobby of the Hotel Grande Bretagne in Athens when he was told he’d won the Nobel prize for literature in 1972. It has also accommodated such prestigious authorial guests as Agatha Christie, Umberto Eco and Sam Shepard (and, allegedly, Brigitte Bardot holds the record for riding a motorcycle down the hotel’s grand staircase – in 22.8 seconds).
CHAMBERS FOR CHARACTERS
Tom Stoppard was right when he said that “hotels operate a separate moral universe” from the normal world. It’s what makes them such a great location for fiction. The clash of classes, the intrigue, the drunkenness, the predilection for nefarious goings-on. These hotspots have seen it all.
But the hotels themselves are not necessarily fictional. Sadly, one of the most spectacular of all literary settings, the Grand Hôtel de Bains on the Venice Lido, described in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice as “half fairytale and half tourist trap”, is boarded up and awaiting a new life as luxury apartments.
But Mann fans need not despair! The slightly less romantic TB sanatorium featured in The Magic Mountain, the Schatzalp Hotel in Davos, is still in rude health and features in the area’s “Thomas Mann Trail”.
I couldn’t spot a mention of Anita Brookner in the promotional materials for the Grand Hôtel Du Lac in Vevey. But perhaps that’s down to the tone of her 1984 Booker-winning novel concerning doomed love on the shores of Lake Geneva. It contains lines such as “Edith, in her veal-coloured room in the Hôtel du Lac, sat with her hands in her lap, wondering what she was doing there.” From the photos on the hotel’s website, I believe they have now done away with the veal.
Dublin’s historic Shelbourne Hotel pops up in James Joyce’s Ulysses – it’s where Leopold Bloom purchases “old wraps and black underclothes” from a “divorced Spanish American”. Brendan Behan, Seamus Heaney and Patrick Kavanagh were frequent guests here.
Devon’s Art Deco icon the Burgh Island Hotel is the setting for two Agatha Christie classics, with both And Then There Were None and Evil Under the Sun taking place there. Described by one of the characters as a “damned odd sort of place”, it’s the one approached at high tide by sea tractor – a damned odd sort of transport.
Just down the road on Bodmin Moor, you can spend the night at The Jamaica Inn, setting for the Daphne Du Maurier smuggling classic, where you can soak up the evocative atmosphere while purchasing a wealth of pirate-themed gift items. And if you’re on the run from smuggling charges and in desperate need of some shelter, Knockinaam Lodge near Stranraer was the hideout of Richard Hannay in John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps.
ROOMS FOR READERS
If your dream minibreak involves not following in the footsteps of writers and their characters but merely making a light dent in a luxury mattress with an unfamiliar view out of the window and a dangerously teetering pile of books nearby, there are plenty of suitable bunkhouses for assiduous bookworms.
The fatal flaw with Leipzig’s Book Hotel is that its most interesting feature is on the outside, while all the book lovers will be tucked up with a tome on the inside, oblivious to the wonders of a building designed to resemble a set of bookshelves. But if these bibliophiles did ever venture out, all of Leipzig’s literary wonders, including the German Museum of Books and Writing, are close by.
For those with a propensity for whipping through a book at breakneck speed and then instinctively reaching for the next one, the Literary Man Hotel in Óbidos, Portugal, claims to be the largest book-themed hotel on the planet, with 100,000 titles lining the shelves of this former convent. Or if you love books and don’t have hay fever, the Bookquet Hotel Prague is dedicated to both reading and flowers, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, all housed in a former 15th-century inn and a stone’s throw from the Clementinum, where you’ll find the stunning Baroque Library, considered one of the most beautiful book depositories in the world.
The recently reopened Grand Hotel Central in Barcelona was once home to Catalan cultural patron Francesc Cambó and still contains his massive personal literary collection, which guests can peruse. It’s also rumoured that authors can claim a discount if they deposit their own book in the hotel’s library.
Meanwhile the Ambassade Hotel in Amsterdam is crammed full of signed editions (5,000 at the last count), donated by the many famous authors who have stayed there, including Salman Rushdie, Paul Auster, Toni Morrison and Isabel Allende.
Or if you’ve ever dreamed of running your own bookshop, you can visit, stay and operate The Open Book in Scotland’s book capital, Wigtown. Reside in the accommodation upstairs, then work for a spell in the bookshop downstairs (hopefully there’s some sort of staff discount for all the titles you’ll be tempted by).
LATE CHECKOUTS FOR LEGENDS
Though they may not necessarily be keen to broadcast this fact, many hotels are famed for being the final resting places of a number of notable authors. Vladimir Nabokov occupied the Swan Suite in Lake Geneva’s Le Montreux Palace for the final 16 years of his life, where he wrote and occasionally popped outside to hunt butterflies.
Renowned Italian poet (and Dante’s best friend) Guido Cavalcanti spent his final years in Florence’s magnificent Torre di Bellosguardo, which was also home to writer Gabriele D’Annunzio. After a shift as a girl’s school, it’s now a luxury guesthouse.
The Hôtel d’Alsace in Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés was described as a “flea-ridden pit” when Oscar Wilde spent his final days there in 1900. Holed up in Room 16, his final words were reported to be “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us must go.” Now the sumptuously furnished decor in the rebranded L’Hôtel’s Oscar Wilde suite might be more to his taste.
SOJOURNS FOR SCRIBES
If you’re trapped in the middle of a low-grade potboiler and have become convinced that you could do a better job yourself, you’ll be needing a writing retreat to inspire and illuminate. And there are plenty of hotels to accommodate.
If you’re planning to take the Scandi Noir world by storm, book yourself into the Sandhamn Seglarhotell, a secluded resort on an island two hours from Stockholm and close to the location of the writing shack of Mikael Blomkvist, the central character in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. Or if you feel you need the inspiration of literary heavyweights, Le Pavillon des Lettres in Paris has rooms dedicated to Baudelaire, Zola and Rousseau, plus works by these greats lining the walls.
But surely the most inspiring place to pen your masterpiece has to be the world’s only residential library. Situated in north Wales, Gladstone’s Library allows you to sleep only inches away from its 150,000 books,
as well as offering silent reading rooms and afternoon teas. How can you resist?
