Modern Life: What is a bookhotel?

Bookhotels cater for compulsive readers.

They have libraries and literary attractions, from writers in residence to rooms dedicated to authors. For some hotels, it’s an appealing additional service; others were conceived from an idiosyncratic passion.

Hotel Sonnenburg in the Austrian Alps has wooden boxes of selected titles in each room. Berlin’s Hotel Friedenau focuses on local writers. Le Pavillon des Lettres in Paris has 26 rooms, featuring authors from Andersen to Zola.

We first heard about bookhotels in Germany in 2018. Our friend Gerd had moved his second-hand bookshop, Mephisto, online and to a village where he hoped to turn the Schloss into a bookhotel furnished from his huge stock, following the example of others in Europe (and America) that began to blossom in the previous decade.

We headed north to the pioneer, Gutshotel in Gross Breeson near Gustrow, opened in 1998. We arrived to find reception deserted, except for stacked boxes of books. In the subterranean restaurant (excellent food, we later discovered) was the waiter who showed us to our room. Its number was painted onto a real book, hanging outside (John Updike’s Couples).

A crammed, comfy reading room also had a record-player with LPS – and occasional books in English: A Pictorial History of the Wild West, Industrial Archaeology of Dartmoor – and Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-lytton, where I discovered the first line ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ was not Snoopy’s literary invention.

Theming was meticulous. The corridors were lined with bookshelves. The walls were hung with classic paintings of readers. The garden was full of statues clutching books, down to the gnome lying in the pond.