Soolip Paperie & Press is this city's undisputed master of stationery. Other shops are perhaps more intimate and tightly edited (Urbanic, on Abbot Kinney), or offer hipper, more elegant letter pressing (Sugar Paper, in Century City), but Soolip was here first and beats everybody else with its variety. The hand-bound Italian leather journals look as if they fell out of da Vinci's own library. I have seen the most hardened pen freaks fall speechless at the sight of the fountain pen selection. Every genre of paper snobbery is accounted for: inks for the calligraphy geeks; silk-screened Japanese yuzen papers for the book-binding crews; Parisian cards and envelopes for the etiquette-obsessed; albums and ribbons and flowers for the scrapbookers; a universe of notebooks for the compulsive diarists. You'll never send another e-mail. 8646 Melrose Ave., W. Hlywd. (310) 360-0154, soolip.com.

—Gendy Alimurung

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