Holed up at the Shang with the family for my brother’s birthday — I just wanted to show you what they leave on the bedspread: bookmarks!
After dinner we returned to the room and found the covers neatly turned up, and the pretty bookmarks on top of the corner triangles.
The bookmarks are printed on ivory board with incut corners, embossed with a lovely damask pattern, and adorned with a teal tassel.
They also feature a quote from the book “Lost Horizon, which, according to wiki, is a 1933 novel by English writer James Hilton. After more wiki-ing, I found the missing link: the book is apparently “best remembered as the origin of Shangri-La, a fictional utopian lamasery high in the mountains of Tibet.”
The lamasery, however,
had more to offer than a
display of Chinoiserie.
One of its features, for instance,
was a very delightful library, lofty and spacious,
and containing a multitude of
books so retiringly housed in bays
and alcoves that the whole
atmosphere was more of wisdom
than of learning, of good manners
rather than seriousness.
I just love passages describing books and libraries!
Bookmarks are such a thoughtful touch to a book lover’s hotel stay, don’t you think? :) Needless to say, I’m hoarding these bookmarks for my collection.
Blooey, a couple of years ago, my husband won stays at two Shangri-La hotels (Boracay and Makati). I was delighted to find those bookmarks as well (the nice cleaning staff even replaced the receipt that was marking my book with a bookmark while I was down at the coffee shop for breakfast), and even more thrilled to discover that the different bookmarks (or hotels) use different quotes! All from the same book though, always pertaining to Shangri-La, of course. Don’t they make lovely keepsakes of a hotel stay? I even marked mine with the dates we were there.
I want to collect all the different versions!