By Rufus Baker Santa Monica
Another era in Santa Monica has come to an end with the closing of the city’s last, family-owned stationery store, Santa Monica Stationers.
As a longtime, loyal customer of Santa Monica Stationers since the 1960s, I cannot let the store and its memories just fade away without a few words of appreciation. A generation ago, there were small stationers supply shops scattered across the city. Perhaps the best known to old-timers would be Carlisle’s Stationer’s, in downtown Santa Monica.
Among the largest was Santa Monica Stationers, located in a cavernous building on Montana Avenue at 10th Street. Its narrow aisles full of products for writers and writing were of magical fascination to me as an ink-in-the-veins high school student in the ’60s. Plus, the shop boasted the first true Xerox copying machine I’d seen for public use. After the untimely passing of store owner Nick, his family relocated the business a mile south on Santa Monica Boulevard, in the same 900 block. For a while, the clientele followed, but over the years, the store seemed to lose customers as a new generation, less inclined to putting pen to paper, emerged.
For four decades, I relied on Santa Monica Stationers for carbon paper, for specialty pens, for typewriter repairs, all sold to the background sounds of recorded big band music. Eventually Santa Monica Stationers shrank from three adjoining storefronts on Santa Monica Boulevard to a single storefront, and unable to compete with the soul-less likes of computer-oriented, ubiquitous Staples and Office Depot, this Santa Monica institution closed its doors for the last time on Friday, July 30. Farewell, old friend.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on August 16, 2004. Read the original PDF.