Mixing Class and Cash

Not all of New York City's holiday shoppers could be found last week at department-store sales. Thousands of people were snapping up presents at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's gift shops. Calvin and Sharon Petersen of Mantua, Utah, bought build-it-yourself paper medieval towns (price: $6.95). Cathy Smith of Medford, Ore., bought a framed print of Nathaniel Currier's lithograph The Favorite Cat ($38). For his mother, Steven Prince, a Los Angeles businessman, selected a shawl imprinted with the tree of life ($25). Says Prince: "Museums sell items of quality. They bring art to the people."

Museum-store sales are booming. This year the shops are expected to generate revenues of about $200 million. Sales at Boston's Museum of Science store have nearly doubled during the past three years, to $850,000 for the fiscal year that ended last April 30. At New York City's Met, sales reached $34 million for the year ending June 30, up 85% since 1981. For the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington saw sales from its nine stores and its mail-order catalog hit $34.5 million, up 29% in just one year. Much of that income is generated during the Christmas season. "A lot of folks find that museum stores are nice places to buy Christmas gifts," says Smithsonian Manager James J. Chmelik. Last year December became the Smithsonian's best-selling month, surpassing April, its longtime leader.

The dramatic growth in museum-store sales partly reflects the sheer variety of products. These range from the sublime to the slightly ridiculous. Staple items include postcards, calendars, notecards and posters. Beyond that, the potpourri is far less predictable. At the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut one can buy a wooden handcrafted model of a ship ($10,000). Shoppers at Boston's Museum of Science store can take home a tiny piece of the moon, complete with a lunar map locating the crater from which the rock was taken. The single best-selling item in the Smithsonian stores is a $1.25 bar of freeze-dried ice cream, similar to the kind that passengers on the space shuttle eat. Houston's Museum of Fine Arts offers a Michael Graves-designed teakettle ($70). The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County sells West African ceremonial feathered headdresses ($160). At the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles one can buy teddy bear pins ($14) and concrete paperweights ($35).

Shoppers often enjoy a museum store's ambience. However crowded the gift shopgets, it suggests an artistic milieu impossible to find in, say, a K mart. Says Cindy Marano, a Washington resident who was visiting Chicago's Art Institute last week: "Museum shops are a wonderful place to buy presents. At malls everything seems the same and impersonal."

Many products also carry an artistic cachet. Says Regina Silvers, a spokeswoman for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City: "We're not trendy. We offer functional art with excellent design." Popular reproductions of a vase designed by Alvar Aalto in 1937 sell for up to $135, while the copy of a Tizio lamp, designed by Richard Sapper in 1971, is $336.