Paige Darrah

A different world — albeit a very small one — still exists on certain blocks in the East Village and on the Lower East Side, where merchants of various generations are still making, fixing or otherwise championing nostalgically tactile niche objects.

A baby boomer who caught the engraving bug as a 16-year-old coin collector in southern Ireland. A Gen X-er who discovered a knack for repairing Game Boy circuitry at the age of 12. A millennial obsessed with pencils. A family business owner in his 50s who, suffice it to say, does not specialize in the cashless movement.

One store has been in operation for more than a half-century. Another opened four years ago.

How do they survive in our land of high retail rents and ruthless online competition? Read on to find out.

CW Pencil Enterprise,15 Orchard Street

On a recent afternoon, Caroline Weaver bent down to clean the front window of her Lower East Side pencil shop. “When we’re closed, children put their faces up against the window,” she said. “So there are always very short face smudge marks.”

Weaver, 28, had just returned from sourcing erasers in Japan, where she is a little bit famous. “I go to stationery stores there, and people know who I am,” she said. “It’s super weird.” A Japanese version of her book, “Pencil Perfect: The Untold Story of a Cultural Icon,” will be released there in January.

Weaver said that much of her foot traffic is driven by curiosity. “Some people are really confused by the notion that somebody in the 21st century would attempt to open a specialty shop. So they come by.”

And she’s noticed a lot of younger people interested in her pencils. “When I opened the shop in 2015, I never thought I’d have high school kids coming in that, like, care about this stuff,” she said.

Jade Lo, 17, a student at Stuyvesant High School, cares so much that she has been interning at CW Pencils for a year. “She sought us out,” Weaver said, “and is even writing her college admissions essay about the pencil.”

Her patrons run the gamut: musicians who need to write on sheet music are particularly keen on an easy-to-erase Japanese pencil designed in the 1980s.

And then there are the orchestra librarians. “I can’t keep track of them,” she said. And yesterday, a New York University student came in looking for special pencils for his law school aptitude test.

Recently, Amy and David Sedaris stopped by (Amy Sedaris is partial to a pink pencil called Futura No. 2).

If there is a competitive tension to be had between her and another local shopkeeper, it would probably be John Casey of Casey Rubber Stamps, since they both sell desk-centric items. But the two get along just fine. At first, Weaver said he was grumpy toward her. But “since he found out I run a pencil shop, she said, “he was like, ‘OK, you’re one of us.’”

Casey Rubber Stamps,322 East 11th Street

“I’m dying,” said John Casey in a thick Irish accent. It was 1 p.m., opening time for his rubber stamps emporium. “I was at Mona’s Bar over on Avenue B with jazz musician friends till 4 a.m.”

Casey, 69, pointed to his cardboard box of Harriet Tubman stamps, which are currently having a moment, then to the wood shaper that carves finger grooves into his white-maple stamps. “For a 400-square-foot place, we do a lot here,” said Casey, who opened the store in 1979.

One surprising seller: a manhole in various sizes that says “NYC Sewer.” Casey personally prefers a more engraved look, like his stamps with 1920s images of speak-easy ladies that used to be on cigarette boxes in nightclubs. “Got them from an old matchbook company catalog. They’re politically incorrect today, but that doesn’t stop them from being fun.”

According to Casey’s mold supplier, there are only three East Coast companies left who make stamps the old-fashioned way (with rubber). The type of molding Casey depends on is primarily used in the packing industry. If the material (Bakelite matrix board) were to cease being used in the packing industry, Casey would have to switch to a more modern system.

“The great thing is, I’m on people’s New York bucket list. People want to come and see,” Casey said. “I get a lot of Argentines and Germans. I get a lot of Japanese. I’m known in Taiwan.”

8 Bit &amp; Up, 86 East Third Street

A neon-green “Video Games” sign and a busty Lara Croft mannequin are in the window of this street-level store. Once inside, customers will find Sonic the Hedgehog hooked up to an old TV and pristine orange Duck Hunt guns lining the walls.

On a recent rainy evening, a low murmur of explosions and karate chop “hy-yas” could be heard throughout the store.

“Want a bev?” asked Marcus Richardson, the manager, sipping a Capri Sun. “The front row is like crack,” he said of the display case. “If it’s any good, I put it up there.”

The display case’s crack is running a bit low tonight. The only Mario option for Game Boy is Mario Picross, which Richardson, 40, likens to “old lady word jumble.” Still, it’s advisable, he said, to peruse the front row carefully. Castlevania (a “gamer’s game”) is there, as is Tetris Attack (“which is not original Tetris but kind of good”).

Richardson said that he sources his inventory from eBay and “bartering from other nerds.”

But staying in business has been challenging, said Joe Tartaglia, the store’s owner.

“The only thing you can do is specialize in a niche,” he explained. “Ours is selling vintage video games; we do not sell any new games. That, you can defend and dominate.” Tartaglia said that he tries to sell things that are hard to get and hard to ship, like arcade cabinets.

“We cater to collectors who prefer to see and touch what they are buying in person and not through a web browser,” he continued. “All we can do is try to add value that they cannot, like doing repairs, letting people try things out before they buy, and giving honest advice.”

Faerman Cash Register Co., 159 Bowery

Brian Faerman’s store has been between Broome and Delancey Streets since 1965, when there were five cash register stores within a five-block radius.

Today Faerman’s feels like a museum. Two long aisles are chock-full of 125-pound cash registers, which have varying degrees of ornateness. There’s a baby blue one from the 1940s as well as the first electric model produced by National Cash Register.

One of Faerman’s current favorites is a brass behemoth custom made for a turn-of-the-century bar owner. “Instead of having to ring up five individual pennies, all you did was press this monster’s five-cent beer button right here.”

Restaurants and bars (especially bars in Brooklyn) that have an old-school look make up a substantial part of Faerman’s business. Set designers also rent and buy registers from him. Danny DeVito visited the store once. “It didn’t matter that he didn’t want to buy a cash register,” Faerman said. “We joked around. An honest, nice guy.”

While customers are allowed to tinker with the registers, Faerman errs on the side of safety. “Watch your belly — the drawer is going to spring out!” Ka-ching!

Faerman, 57, a third-generation cash register guy, has grown used to the unexpected. Five years ago a customer scooped up an entire row of “brassies.” He seems to miss them. “Every one of them was beautiful,” he said. The customer paid $28,000 for them, Faerman said, then gave the lot away as Christmas presents.

This article originally appeared in

How These Niche Stores Are Surviving the Retail Apocalypse

NEW YORK — Want an experience other than ordering impersonal packages from your sofa on Cyber Monday?

<h1>When Zakaria, 55, isn’t shooting a live segment for CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS — which airs Sundays and has recently covered everything from the Venezuelan protests to Brexit —</h1>

He spends time in his cherished study, writing at his messy desk, or cooking, or roaming the city with his daughter, Sofia, 10. Growing up in “a little town outside Bombay,” Zakaria watched “I Love Lucy” every Sunday, he said.

These days, the Upper West Side resident prefers documentaries or vintage culinary videos on YouTube. “Most cooking shows today are more like game shows, he said. They “don’t actually teach you to cook.”

THE TEA RITUAL: I wake up at 7 a.m. I exercise almost everyday, so I like to get that out of the way. But not before I’ve had a cup of tea. With real milk. Because I grew up in India, I am very finicky about tea. Basically a very strong, rich Assam that would be called ‘workman’s tea’ in Britain. And I always drink it from a ceramic mug my son made when he was 6 at the pottery studio Supermud. All our three kids have been there over the years.

THINK SWEAT...: When it’s really cold, I get on the treadmill and watch courses on YouTube — I’m a total nerd. Lately I’ve been running to a great Yale course by historian John Merriman. He does modern French history in 45-minute lectures, which is perfect for a run.

...OR RIVER RUN: I live half a block from Riverside Park, so I go into the park at 103rd Street. Depending on the weather, there’s a lovely shaded run (for when it’s sunny) from 112th Street to 120th Street and then you can go up the staircase and then back. I’ll do that basically twice so that’s 4 miles. Or I’ll go right on the river and I’ll run up to 145th street and back; or I run down to 57th street and back. Central Park gets all the attention, but it’s so overrun with tourists you feel like you’re in Disneyland.

FATHER/DAUGHTER DATE: I always make Sofia breakfast. This is very important: she likes buckwheat pancakes with monkey or elephant faces seared on them. Then, to connect her to her life in New York, we’ll do play dates with friends from her old school. Then sometimes we’ll go to Saravana Bhavan on 80th and Amsterdam, which serves extraordinary dosas — a South Indian sort of crepe made from fermented rice batter. And thenwe almost always do some excursion together. Sofia loves going to the Frick Collection again and again; we went to the Flatiron district’s National Museum of Mathematics too, recently. I get claustrophobic in museums, so we choose one exhibit and spend 90 minutes there, max.

HEART AND SOUL: After I put Sofia on a train back to her mother in Rhinebeck, I do something very boring: work on my book. For me, the heart and soul of this brownstone where I’ve lived for 14 years is the study. When “The Post-American World” did well abroad, I got an infusion of cash I hadn’t expected. So I got a great Brooklyn woodworker guy to make the study of my dreams out of English Pine. Now it looks supremely civilized because all the mess is contained behind this huge desk’s mirrored doors.

DINNER WITH FRIENDS: I cook a lot. I would say three out of four Sundays. My closest friends are from college and grad school, and I often have a few of them over. We drink, eat, talk. The other day I made faro spaghetti Bolognese and we opened two very very nice Italian wines — a Barolo and a Brunello.

FRENCH INFLUENCE: I don’t have the shallots and garlic neatly chopped in little bowls or anything. I kind of wing it because it’s too boring otherwise, and I find thefear of failure keeps you more engaged and in the moment than if you’re always looking down at a recipe. I taught myself to cook by watching Jacques Pépin on Boston Public Television during grad school in the ‘80s. There’s this Jacques Pépin-making-an-omelet video on YouTube that’s the classic. He’s basically the world’s best cook, and without question the chef I watch the most.

BEDTIME HABITS: My iPhone sleeps right next to me. Arianna Huffington would have a heart attack, but yeah, the last thing I do before bed is check emails and the next day’s newspaper stories on Le Monde and the Financial Times. I mostly wear British Airways pajamas. Sometimes they give them to youon planes, so I’ve amassed a collection over the years. But I don’t wear like Winston Churchill-tailored pajamas or anything.

Assam Tea and Father-Daughter Time: How CNN Host Spends His Sundays

NEW YORK — “Yes, my desk is always messy,” said Fareed Zakaria, the CNN host and author. This is somewhat surprising, given the elegant outer order of the journalist’s work life.

Assam tea and father-daughter time: how CNN host spends his Sundays

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Paige Darrah

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How These Niche Stores Are Surviving the Retail Apocalypse

Assam tea and father-daughter time: how CNN host spends his Sundays