DAN HOTELS OF ISRAEL
A
SUPER
EXPERIENCE
Hotels Have Havens
For The Literate
HAROLD JACOBSON SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS
per person
in double room
Starting at
including breakfast
DAN PANORAMA, TEL AVIV — DAN PANORAMA, HAIFA
DAN PEARL, JERUSALEM* — DAN CAESAREA
Any combination of Dan Hotels for a minimum of seven nights.
*Scheduled opening Summer 1995
Rates valid as of March 1, 1995
(varies by season)
PL US
per person
in double room
including breakfast
Starting at
KING DAVID, JERUSALEM — DAN TEL AVIV — DAN CARMEL, HAIFA
DAN ACCADIA, HERZLIYA — DAN EILAT*
Any combination of Dan Hotels for a minimum of seven nights.
*Opening July 1995
Rates valid as of March 1, 1995
(varies by season)
For information and reservations,
please call your travel agent or
Israel Hotel Representatives
(212) 752-6120 or outside New York
State Toll Free: 800-223-7773/4
or FAX: (212) 759-7495
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W
hat do you do in your
hotel when you cannot
abide the insipidities of
television and it's too
late to go out and you don't want
to eat or drink anymore?
A number of very distin-
guished and adventurous hotels
are trying to meet that need by
appealing to their guests' more
literate and aesthetic tastes and
supplying them with libraries
and quiet reading rooms. This
may be an unconscious attempt
to reconstruct the wonderful li-
braries that could be found on the
great ocean liners which criss-
crossed the Atlantic in yesteryear.
But at least in a hotel reading
room one needn't fear nausea.
One of the first hotels to appeal
to the literate tastes of its guests
was the New York Hilton. In its
Executive Tower, situated 47
floors above Manhattan's din,
guests fleeing from sitcoms, docu-
dramas, and televised public tri-
als, can find a wide array of
periodicals, newspapers and mag-
azines from three continents
which they can peruse in com-
modious quarters. The New York
Hilton understood, almost a
decade and a half ago, that there
were television refugees that
could be induced to engage in
some light reading while drink-
ing coffee and other beverages.
In Florida, when the rains
come and the occasional drop in
temperatures, habitues of the
Boca Raton Resort and Club can
repair to the hotel's concierge
lounge and there, in sumptuous-
ly relaxing surroundings, they
can glean information from half
dozen local and international
dailies.
The Boca Raton Resort and
Club's library, also found in the
concierge lounge, is under lock
and key; but hostesses will help
you select suitable reading from
the 100 volumes in the small but
appealing library.
The library at the Marriot
Marco Island Resort on the south-
ernmost tip of Florida's Gulf
Coast is an open stack one with
a lending policy that can't be beat.
Potential readers are invited nei-
ther to buy nor borrow books;
guests may simply take the book
that pleases them. No questions
asked.
During a recent visit to the ho-
tel, this writer tested the invita-
tion and found several
stimulating non-fiction works in
the Marriot's collection, includ-
ing Erich Segal's surprisingly
good survey of the medical pro-
fession, The Doctors. George
Bums' engaging biography of his
wife Gracie is another of the ap-
proximately 150 titles that the
Marriot offers — free for the tak-
ing.
One of the most curious li-
braries in the hotel industry is
found in the Harbor Court, a
stunning hostelry facing Balti-
more's Harbor Front. Initially
this writer believed that in the
city of H.L. Mencken, the great
journalist and author of The
American Dictionary and other
works, a hotel with a library
would be an entirely natural de-
velopment.
There is one problem, howev-
er, with the Harbor Court's li-
brary. All the books in the
handsomely appointed wood pan-
elled reading room just off the re-
ception area are in Danish! One
must assume charitably that the
hotel markets its virtues in the
Scandinavian market of that its
guests are multilingual.
In most of the exclusive hotels
readers will have to leave their
rooms in order to browse through
the hotel's holdings. There is one
hotel in California, however, that
makes this unnecessary. The
L'Ermitage, an all-suite facility
in Beverly Hills, has a library in
every one of its two-floor guest
suites.
While some of the titles appear
to have been purchased by the
yard rather than by normal se-
lection procedures, at least half
of the 75 volumes were up to date
non-fiction works by David Hal-
berstam, Morley Safir and Bob
Simon and thriller novels by
Robert Ludlum. Reading a book
in television and film-saturated
Los Angeles may be seen as an
act of heroic defiance.
Perhaps the best reading room
in any hotel in North America is
found at the Ritz Carlton in La-
guna Beach, Calif. Books are kept
in the aptly named The Library,
a bar cum reading alcove on the
main floor which looks out on
three sides to the majestic Pacif-
ic Ocean.
The genteel atmosphere and
the highly polished mahogany
furniture, railing and other ap-
pointments in The Library help
make up for the bizarre melange
dales available at the Ritz Carl-
ton's reading room. They include
old volumes of statutes from sev-
eral American states, out-of-date
medical journals and a scatter-
ing of some recent novels.
The best hotel libraries to en-
joy in winter are found in Ver-
mont. Top Notch at Stowe,
known primarily for its skiing,