Smitten With Stationery

Why would anybody shop for shoes, when they can shop for wrapping paper?

Who searches for the perfect dress when they can seek the perfect blank journal or daily planner?

Not Karen Harper of Studio City. I ran into Harper at Studio City’s A n B Stationery, an institution on Ventura Boulevard for almost 25 years.

To those whose hearts don’t leap at the thought of a new fountain pen, this is just another place to buy office supplies, cards and gifts. But to those of us who never met a black-and-white-covered composition book we didn’t like, stationery stores are places of pilgrimage.

On this particular morning, Harper is a focused shopper.

“I came here on a mission,” says Harper, who is looking for thank-you notes for her oldest daughter. Bryanna Harper celebrated her 13th birthday recently with a rock ‘n’ bowl party at a nearby bowling alley, and her mother has wisely decided to make the process of acknowledging her gifts less onerous by finding great note cards.

In the past almost anything that was hip or appealed to girls might have sufficed. But the selection is trickier this year. This was Bryanna’s first coed birthday party, and she can ill-afford notes that smack of cute.

Harper solves the problem when she comes across note cards bearing comic but sophisticated images of rotund cats. Called “Fat Cats,” the cards feature large kitties not unlike the ones the Harpers have at home.

Harper and I laugh over our shared passion for stationers, especially ones that don’t overwhelm you with what she calls a bazillion choices. I tell her about the time I was writing a book and came to A n B for file folders. Staples, Office Depot and other office-supply superstores have served me well on many occasions. But they don’t stock file folders in two dozen shades as this one does.

I had decided to color-code my files for that project. It turns out you can find green folders almost anywhere, which were ideal for filing papers that had to do with money, such as contracts and correspondence about foreign sales and other fiscal matters.

And it’s easy to find red folders, apt for the chapter on the Apple Macintosh (apple red, get it?) and Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, where the personal computer was born. But A n B was the only place I found black folders, perfect for the chapter on Black Mountain College, and the store also had lovely sea-foam green folders that had no special meaning, color-wise, but made me smile whenever I filed away material relating to the introductory chapter.

Like magazine stands, stationery stores are full of promise. Something life-transforming could be in there somewhere. And it doesn’t cost anything to browse.

“There’s always something interesting at the stationery store,” says Harper, “a little something that you didn’t think you needed and you take it home and it’s perfect.”

Asked for an example, she doesn’t pause a heartbeat before answering: “Those really cool paper clips that have a big wide mouth that hold multiple pieces of paper.”

Well, yeah. Or stickers or disposable ink pens or calendars, especially millennial calendars, or rubber stamps or those neat little things that allow you to flag pages in your books without damaging them and have a little white space where you can write notes.

Is it just me or doesn’t everybody think the Post-it is the greatest invention since the Salk vaccine?

Elsewhere in the store a woman is looking at pens. I introduce myself and ask what she is doing, and she says buying a gift for her assistant. She doesn’t want to tell me her name because she is an actress and gets hassled (I don’t know who she is although she is very beautiful, even for Southern California, and I know she isn’t Halle Berry).

The actress, too, is a big fan of stationery stores and their small treasures.

“Journal-y little books, that’s my favorite,” she says.

Growing up, she always had nice journals, not the inexpensive composition books so many of us used, hoping that the books themselves would have some alchemical effect that would transform the base metal of our immature prose into something along the lines of “The Catcher in the Rye” or “A Separate Peace.”

But like the rest of us, she discovered completing a journal is a lot harder than buying one.

“I just start them sometimes,” she says. “And sometimes I just buy them and don’t write anything.”

You can speculate on what draws people to stationery stores. Perhaps they provide a way to recapture the youthful excitement of buying back-to-school supplies. After all, what is fall without a new pencil box and protractor?

The lure of blank journals and engagement calendars is understandable: They are a way to start over, as sure a symbol of a new and better life as New Year’s Eve or the first crocus. Planners with lots of dividers and household budget books are both the means and the emblems of reform for people who have no intention of getting up at a 12-step meeting and declaring, “Hi, I’m Serge, and I’m organizationally challenged.”

But orderly people like stationery stores, too. Bronze Ard, of Woodland Hills, is sitting for the certified public accountant’s exam and often comes into the store when he’s taking a break from his job nearby as a bookkeeper.

“I’m constantly looking for different things to organize myself,” he says.

Because this is Hollywood--or at least Hollywood adjacent--A n B has photos of celebrity customers on the wall.

Among them is Ernest Borgnine. I can’t see that far without my glasses, but I wonder if his picture is inscribed: “Love your sea-foam file folders. Best wishes and Post-it notes, Ernie.”