Distinctly a joyous book is Mr. Jefferson WiMamson's The American
Hotel (Knopf, I5s.) As the hotel business ranks ninth among America's major industries, there is a clear call for a book which gives an anecdotal history of the evolution of the American hotel from the crude country tavern to the realization of its fullest glories which this year will see completed in the shape of the new Waldorf-Astoria and the Hotel Pierre in New York. With plumbing, accommodation and elevator statistics Mr. Williamson deals very completely, but it is the good stories he tells and the wealth of tickling detail in the book that are such joys. "Ours," stated a Boston hotel-keeper in 1847, "is a temperance house, prayers orthodox, but if you and your lady should not attend prayers it will not be noticed." The attitude of landlords generally Was, "Treat 'em rough — especially Englishmen.' Englishmen, Mr. Williamson tells us, were "fussy travellers." Sometimes they even ventured to ask for tea in their own rooms, and were told by the justly indignant landlord, "We have no family tea-drinking here, and you must either eat with my wife and me or not at all in my house."
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