Friday, July 22, 2005

Sylvia Beach Hotel

Finally, we arrived at the Sylvia Beach after having driven through Pacific Northwest forests that seemed ready to swallow our car at any moment. The Hotel is charming; every room is designed after a different famous author; there is a Melville Suite with an enormous bed, an Edgar Allen Poe room with a Poe bust, working pendulum over the bed, stuffed raven and a bricked in "door", an Oscar Wilde Room with floral wallpaper and orchids, and so on. I have no idea why they don't have a James Joyce Room though. We took the Lincoln Steffens room for two reasons:
1) My great-grandfather Guy Hickok was friends with Steffens while they were both newspapermen in Paris. He's mentioned in the Letters and Autobiography,
2) He was actually much better friends with Hemingway, but that room was taken,
3) It was either that or the Dr. Seuss Room, which had a child's bed.

Our room was beautiful. It reminded me of a guest room at an older relative's home. It had comfortable reading rooms, no clock and a charming cat who came into our room to sniff us out and climb around our bags. It also had an old typewriter like the old newspaper men used. I love the old typewriters with their metal exoskeleton and machine-gun rapport; they're like the war machine of linear thought. The Hotel is a shrine to the craftsmen who patiently constructed sentences in the old fashion.

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