Books and Breakfast

Book lovers have their own special system for rating hotels. Naturally, top points go to rooms with good lamps, cheery fireplaces and chairs you can plop into with ease. But what tips reader-friendly lodging into the premier category are serenity and literary spirit. Now that it's time to put away the beach novels and get into more fallish and substantial books, we went hunting for accommodations with just such amenities. Here are three potential bestsellers nearby (including one in Washington itself).

-- Gary Lee

Alexander House Booklovers Bed & Breakfast, Princess Anne, Md.

Past the wraparound porch with the wooden French-blue floor and white wicker furniture, through the hallway lined with books that had lingered on my mental reading list (biographies of Jackie Onassis and Mary Todd Lincoln, among others), up the stairs past portraits of the likes of Pablo Neruda and Isabella Allende, I wondered how I could yank myself away after one night.

It took all of five minutes to settle into the Jane Austen Room. It is a homebody's nest: welcoming queen-size bed, reading chair with lamp, and a stereo, made to look like a Victrola, for listening to recorded readings from "Pride and Prejudice." Flopping from one comfortable perch to another, book in hand, I was at home.

This place, a three-hour drive from Washington in the Eastern Shore town of Princess Anne, is Neverland for fanatical readers. Without telephones, televisions or other distractions, it has the solitude readers crave. And in every corner there is a novel, biography, volume of poetry or other tome.

Elizabeth Alexander, manager and co-owner, re-tooled this 116-year-old Queen Anne house into a bed-and-breakfast for book lovers. A different literary star inspired each of the three guest rooms. The Langston Hughes Room is decorated with a portrait of the famed poet, an LC Smith typewriter and other period pieces from the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes's heyday. The Robert Louis Stevenson Room is filled with works by the author, paintings of seaside settings he favored and other nautical touches. And the Jane Austen Room exudes a Victorian aura.

Downstairs is Cafe Colette, a bright yellow room where breakfast is served and Scrabble and other board games are stacked. Finally, there is the Mark Twain Reading Parlor, where guests in their pajamas and slippers linger over books.

For those who can tear themselves away, Princess Anne, an impressive stronghold of finely preserved Victorian-era homes, is an excellent setting for leisurely walks.

Alexander House Booklovers Bed & Breakfast, 30535 Linden Ave., Princess Anne, Md., 410-651-5195, http://www.bookloversbnb.com/. Rates for double rooms range from $85 to $150 a night, including private baths and an individually prepared full breakfast.

Great Oak Manor, Chestertown, Md.

In the library, a salon hideaway lined with hardbacks and other tempting reading matter, Dave and Noel Banowitz, retirees from Bethesda, were ensconced on the comfortable couch. She leafed through a magazine. He was deep into Kazuo Ishiguro's "When We Were Orphans."

Great Oak Manor provides rural peace and excellent chairs.

"It's my book club's selection of the month," he said. "I'm making wonderful headway here."

Small wonder. Set at the end of a winding road 10 miles from the center of Chestertown (two hours by car from downtown Washington), this sweep of stately rooms is about as far as possible from the noise of the city. A family lodge constructed right on the Chesapeake Bay in the 1930s and later converted into a 12-room bed-and-breakfast, Great Oak resembles a country retreat in England.