¶ I need an Apica 8X11 spiral-bound notebook right now. I’ve got one on order at Amazon, but it’s coming from Japan and won’t get here until the end of the month. Unacceptable! So I climbed the lower slopes of Carnegie Hill in numbing weather this afternoon to buy one at Venture Stationery, which moved a few years ago from its immemorial location on Madison Avenue between 85th and 86th to much smaller premises on Lexington somewhere between 80th and 83rd — I was never really sure. I found it, between 80th and 81st. The awning is still there, but the shop is empty.

Kathleen said that she wasn’t surprised; the new store had so much less stock; it wasn’t at all the cornucopia of pens and pads and strange glues and — Apica notebooks — that the Madison Avenue place had been. To me, it was the move itself that did the store in. The new location simply wasn’t in the right neighborhood; it was too far down Carnegie Hill. Madison Avenue between 79th and 96th Streets is the Upper East Side’s High Street, where people who live here full time do their shopping. Lexington is where their caterers do their shopping.  

This entry was posted on Friday, February 9th, 2018 at 9:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.