Last night, about 150 bookish folk raised their glasses to a new partnership. The refurbished and reopened Algonquin Hotel hopes to resurrect its literary reputation by hosting the Penguin Previews Series at the Round Table–readings and talks featuring Penguin authors held in the famed hotel lobby, where the wits of the Algonquin Round Table met and traded barbs through the 1920s.

After they’d had their fill of the thematic cocktails (The Penguin, a variation on a White Russian, and The Matilda, a liquored-up mimosa named for the housecat that lives in the lobby and serves as the hotel’s mascot, perhaps even more so than Dorothy Parker), partygoers traded in a postcard-size photo of the resident kitty for a gift bag. Below the jump, a catalog of the goodies contained therein.

Clockwise from the top:

A black Classic Penguin tote bag (because the 10 we have isn’t enough)

A brochure for the New York Pops 2012-2013 season (the musical trio playing the party were members of the New York Pops)

A ball-point pen with the New York Pops logo on the side

A Thousand Mornings, poems by Mary Oliver

The Portable Dorothy Parker, edited by Marion Meade (which, ironically, is a rather hefty thing)

Penguin Classics: A Complete Annotated Listing

Four notecards featuring photographs of old New York buildings (photographs that also hang in the rooms of the Algonquin) by Irving Underhill

A matted piece of former Algonquin wallpaper adorned with various New Yorker cartoons (at the center of our segment was a James Thurber cartoon)

The Penguin Previews Series at the Round Table begins this week with three events during BookExpo America and will then continue on a quarterly basis.

Follow Laura L. Griffin on Twitter or via RSS.