What it’s actually like
Every town has a shop that the town’s big occasions pass through, and in Scottsdale for nearly fifty years it has been The Paper Place. The family-owned stationery store on Marshall Way is where weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs, showers, private parties, charity balls and corporate galas begin, as a sample book on a table and a conversation about paper. The shop’s own phrase for what it became is the hub for the social news of greater Phoenix, and anybody who has received a heavy, engraved-looking envelope from a Scottsdale address has a fair chance of having held its work.
It was started in 1978 by Judy Silver, a tennis player and community volunteer who decided that if a friend’s stationery store could thrive in Des Moines it could fly in Phoenix, and her older daughter Nancy. They opened in 800 square feet on what the family calls an arty side street; in 1992 the shop crossed the street to the much larger space it occupies now. Younger daughter Betsy joined shortly before Judy died in 1994, and the two sisters have run the store together since.
The room is part showroom, part card shop. Invitation albums from dozens of lines fill the tables, personalized stationery and notecards line the walls, and the front of the shop is given over to cards, writing papers, gift wrap and small gifts. It is a store where the service is the product, and the people helping you with the wording have been doing it for decades.
What to buy
Custom invitations. The signature. Traditional or contemporary, for any occasion, with help on wording, quick turnaround on printing, and addressing and calligraphy if you want the envelopes done too.
Personalized stationery. Notecards and correspondence paper with a monogram or motif, from houses such as Crane, William Arthur, Oblations and Vera Wang, and the thank-you notes that should follow every one of the above.
A card and a gift. The walk-in purchase: a good card, a sheet of decorative wrap and something small from the gift shelves, done in five minutes.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The shop is on the gallery blocks of Marshall Way, a short walk south of the Bronze Horse Fountain at Fifth Avenue, with Wilde Meyer Gallery and the rest of the row for neighbors. Street spaces on Marshall are scarce; the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard and the public garage on the Fifth Avenue side near the canal are the reliable options. The Old Town on foot note maps the district and the Downtown & 5th Ave guide covers what is around it.
Hours are Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., plus appointments, and an invitation order is the kind of visit worth booking: it takes time, and you want it to be unhurried. Wedding season planning runs well ahead of the Valley’s peak wedding months in the cool season, so start early if your date falls between October and April. For quick needs, orders placed online can be picked up in the store.
If you are combining errands with a gallery walk, come on a Thursday afternoon and stay for ArtWalk after the shop closes; Marshall Way is the walk’s northern leg and the Main Street Arts District is a few minutes south.
Eat while you’re there
Ponderosa House, across Marshall Way, is the cantina-and-patio lunch. Berdena’s in Craftsman Court is the coffee a block west, Citizen Public House on Fifth Avenue is the gastropub for a longer lunch, and Arcadia Farms Café on First Avenue is the daytime café with the most civilized patio in the arts district, and the place to debrief after the appointment.
How it got here
Scottsdale’s arts district was taking shape when The Paper Place opened. The galleries had spread from Main Street onto Marshall Way and the side streets through the 1970s, the Thursday ArtWalk had started in 1975, and the small storefronts around them were filling with the shops that serve a resort town with money and a social calendar. Judy Silver had seen a friend open a stationery store in Des Moines, and reasoned that if one could succeed in the Midwest, one would do even better in a growing Phoenix suburb full of weddings and fundraisers.
In 1978 she and her daughter Nancy opened an 800-square-foot shop, and the business grew with the Valley. Through the 1980s Scottsdale’s resort and charity-ball circuit expanded, the population boomed, and the shop became the default address for invitations of every kind, from a child’s party to a gala. In 1992 it crossed the street to a much larger space, the one it occupies today.
Judy died in 1994, shortly after her younger daughter Betsy joined, and the sisters took on the store together. In their own account they run it with a minimum of sibling rivalry, after more buying trips than they can count. The shop has adapted to the internet without being replaced by it, adding online ordering for pickup, but the core of the business is still the sample book, the appointment and the conversation about wording.
In a district where galleries open and close with the art market, a family stationery store approaching its fiftieth year is one of the steadier fixtures on Marshall Way. Wilde Meyer, the street’s pioneering gallery, opened five years later, and Wiseman & Gale Interiors has held the far end of the street since 1965; between them they are the old guard of a street that is otherwise always changing.