Apart from an idle man halfheartedly flipping through a book of local attractions, there was no one in the front of the shop, where miniature carved boats and modelfish aged unwanted on the shelves.
In his Upper West Side office, Mark Kurlansky, author of The Big Oyster, a chronicle of the rise and fall of the bivalve in New York, is couched by a hotch potch of model ships, statuettes of jumping fish, an atlas, piles of novels, foreign language dictionaries, encyclopedias and loose papers.