As a boy, I loved visiting the stationery store, lingering over the dazzling array of luxurious papers and the writing instruments with gold nibs. Later, I took my first child, Elena, to such a shop. She came to know the love of notebooks. As soon as she could write, she had diaries embossed with her name. The stationer’s was more interesting to her than the toy store. Office Depot and the like, along with Amazon, wiped out our original shop and others. During this period of industrial smashing, Elena described our stationer’s shop as “cup filling” and those doing the smashing as “soul killing.”

Just as independent bookstores have come back, so too have stationery shops. Most recently we discovered Passenger in Evanston (1303 Chicago Ave.). It specializes in beautiful papers, in addition to teas you rarely find outside Japan. You’ll also find paper used for more than stationery and business cards here: There are paper lamps, sculptures, and jewelry, as well as Azuma bags made from hemp and dyed using leftover food. Fine wooden lunchboxes, as well as exotic metal flower vases, make shopping here a delight. Sometimes we go just to smell the incense and fill our cups.