Thomas Jefferson and Friend, Side by Side, in a Hotel Library
By Jacob A. Stein
Hotels here and there have bookshelves known as the guest library for people who wish to read Reader’s Digest abridgements, National Geographics, paperback mysteries, government publications, U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports, and out of date volumes of the old Funk and Wagnall’s Encyclopedia.
The Homestead and The Greenbrier, when I last looked, provided their guests reports on the state of U.S. agriculture published by the U.S. Government Printing Office, Civil War books with the pictures missing, a book on veterinarian remedies, a course on how to shoe a horse, and diagrams of Bobby Jones’ golfing stroke.
The New York hotel libraries I have seen include “as told to” autobiographies of once popular politicians and television performers, along with the Reader’s Digest abridgements.
Every now and then, there is an attractive, well-worn book that has something about it that makes it worth a riffle of the pages. I found at the Elysée Hotel such a book, The Paradine Case, published in 1933. The author, Robert Hichens, was new to me. The book is about a highly moral British barrister who makes the mistake of falling in love with his client, a client charged with murdering her husband. Each character—the lawyer, the defendant, and the trial judge—stands out as a real life person caught up in a tragedy. Hichens got into the minds of the lawyer and judge so cleverly, it made me wonder if he had a legal background. He did not.
Hichens (1864–1950), in his youth, had an interest in music. In his twenties, he turned to writing.
Hichens, after meeting Oscar Wilde, described the latter in a satirical novel titled The Green Carnation (1894). It was a success, and Hichens was on his way. His best-selling book, The Garden of Allah (1904), sold more than 700,000 copies.
The Paradine Case was made into a movie starring Gregory Peck as the lawyer. Unfortunately, the movie bears no relationship to the book.
In reading up about Hichens, I came across a friend of his, Reginald Turner, who was a novelist, but a novelist whose novels did not sell. Turner said that the only books more rare than his first editions were his second editions. One of his books was in a tramp steamer library, so when an acquaintance told him she had read that very novel, he told her where she had been, just as Professor Henry Higgins could tell, by the accent, where a person was raised. Turner said the boat was sunk during World War I. Thus, his sole surviving novel went down with the crew and passengers:
