I have been coming to my neighborhood store, Fishs Eddy since 1990 and still frequent it on any given day. When I read that owner Julie Gaines has a small museum above the store I was inspired to visit. Ms Graves is charming, funny and filled with incredible stories and knowledge about all the many things in this wonderful space. Fishs Eddy is an the eccentric dishware emporium on the corner of Broadway and East 19th Street, where you can find classic 1950s-style cafeteria-ware, mugs with the face of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and butter dishes that say “BUTTAH.” Founders Julie Gaines and Dave Lenowitz started the business in 1985 at a storefront near Gramercy Park, selling unused plates they had rescued from the basements of restaurant-supply shops on the Bowery. They used salvaged nail kegs and wooden crates to display their wares and decorated the store’s walls with Gaines’s collection of flea-market paintings. Gaines recounts all this and more in a new graphic memoir, Minding the Store: A Big Story About a Small Business. Most of today’s photos are from the museum but you can see lots of photos of the actual store in my links.