WALLPAPER CITY GUIDE – NEW YORK – Library Hotel

The pocket-size Wallpaper* City Guides are a new concept in travel guides published as joint venture between Phaidon Press and Wallpaper* magazine.
Aimed at the design conscious traveller, the guides offer just the right amount of insider knowledge on the world’s most popular cities, from where to stay and what to visit, to where you should eat, shop and be seen.

The guides have been compiled by Wallpaper* magazine’s international editors and travel writers who have lived in the featured cities. They provide up-to-the-minute information and authoritative advice on the hottest of venues in the coolest of cities. Each guide will be updated annually to ensure they remain the authoritative ‘last word’ on the city concerned.
The guides are divided into sections on Landmarks, Hotels, 24 Hours, Urban Life, Architour, Shopping, Sports and Spas, and Escapes. In addition, each one features a local resident recommending their own favourite places to visit in that city and sharing their insider knowledge. Maps and aerial photography are included for easy navigation and orientation and there is even a notebook to record personal discoveries and recommendations. Each section is subtly tabbed with a different color to make it easy for you to find the information you need. And the covers fold out to provide, in the case of the New York Guide, a photograph of Manhattan showing prominent landmarks at the front, and at the back a map of Manhattan.
As you would expect with anything from Wallpaper they are beautifully designed. My view is they are not aimed at the first-time visitor to a city so even though I have visited New York many, many times I bought a copy anyway.

For the record the complete list of cities covered to date includes Amsterdam, Bangkok, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Istanbul, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Mexico City, Milan, New York, Paris, Rome, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney and Tokyo.

One of the hotels listed in the New York Guide particularly interested me.

Called the Library Hotel “it boasts one of the more bizarre concepts behind hotel design. Each floor of the Library is dedicated to one of the ten categories of the Dewey Decimal System of book classification and each room’s décor reflects a different topic with more than 6,000 books used throughout.So if you are a poetry fan, for example, ask for that particular room and you’ll have plenty to read.”

I was especially interested in The Library Hotel because earlier this year while enjoying a stop-over in Koh Samui, Thailand on the way home from Europe we stumbled on to The Library Hotel which had recently opened there, right on Chaweng Beach. I was taken by the name and also the sculptures in the grounds, all with a reading theme, a few of which I managed to photograph before the security guard stopped me.

I'd like to stay there sometime.

Their website is www.thelibrary.name