With no Wi-Fi and no TVs in the bedrooms, you’re encouraged to put your screens away for your stay and enjoy print books and face-to-face conversations without distractions. You’ll also find a sea-view living room where cellphones are prohibited and a library in the loft at the top of the house. Rather than a bookshop & lending library, however, they created the Sylvia Beach Hotel, a bed & breakfast with each room themed through the decor for a different author. Years later, two women in Newport, Oregon had a similar desire to create a place for readers and writers to retreat, discourse, read, and write. Her memoir documents the 1920’s American expat writers who visited her shop. The Sylvia Beach Hotel is named after the woman who started the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris. Beach loved books and gathering readers and writers around her for company. It became a place to stay, discourse, and eventually a publishing house. The shop drew the now-famous American expatriate authors of the 1920’s living in Paris and became much more than a shop.

Sylvia Beach, with help from her female partner started an American lending library and bookshop in Paris in 1919. When I called to make my reservation the woman on the other end of the line had quizzed me. I wouldn’t really need it for the next couple days and I was excited.

The chairs in the Sylvia Beach Hotel lobby are reupholstered in bookish fabric and the tables look like stacks of books. The book-print reupholstered chairs that greet lovers of literature in the lobby only hint at what you’ll find above stairs. Inside, however, is neat and tidy, and a bibliophile’s dream retreat. Weathered bare wood shows in large patches where the sea wind has taken away the siding, making the outside look like any well-loved book should, worn and faded. The exterior of the historic Victorian style building is a warm teal, similar in color, yet different in shade to Shakespeare and Company, the now-famous American bookstore in Paris started by the hotel’s namesake, Sylvia Beach. On the top of a windswept cliff, overlooking the beach below sits the Sylvia Beach Hotel.

If you purchase a book through them I will earn a few cents at no extra cost to you. Shakespeare and Company by Sylvia Beach Purchase via IndieBound | Amazon