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 (him .16.fets. ,Vswerel HILTON HEAD ISLAND, SC BEACH LUS A npieeit, Choose From Over 200 Of The Finest Horne & Villa Rentals! FREE TENNIS & GOLF PACKAGES : -111f it II p imaki 104 itOs' I FREE COLOR BROCHURE LANCASTER RESORT RENTALS 800-S45-7017 "Putting people and vacations together for over 35 yean" Come to a life of luxury villas and secluded snow-white beaches along , the shores of majestic Mead's Bay. 1-800-235-8667 or call your tra*.agent - CLASSIFIED GET RESULTS! Call The Jewish News 354-5959 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,