Department Stores By Theodore Fischer Special to washingtonpost.com Tuesday, September 11, 2001

DOI's Indian Craft Shop is a great repository of Native American arts and crafts. Craig Cola/washingtonpost.com

Department of the Interior
Department of the Interior, 1849 C St. NW. An art deco-style building with stunning New Deal-era murals along its corridors, the Department of Interior tells its story with several intriguing shops. (Photo ID -- driver's license, etc. -- is required for building admission.)

Opened in 1938, the Indian Craft Shop sells fine American Indian arts and crafts (pottery, quill and beadwork, sculpture, weavings, basketry) produced by more than 45 U.S. tribal groups. Occupying a pair of smallish Spanish Colonial rooms opposite the Department of Interior Museum, the shop offers a range from sand-painting magnets ($4.50) to a child-size Athabascan doll clad in a moose-hide dress ($5,000). Kids will go for the Hopi/English books, dream catchers and Eskimo yo-yos.

Nirvana for map nuts, the U.S. Geological Survey (U.S.G.S.) Earth Science Information Center specializes in ultra-detailed "topo" (topographic) maps covering every inch of the United States (starting at $4 per sheet). The vast trove also includes maps of national parks, presidential election maps, satellite maps of the District and a map of U.S. earthquakes between 1535 and 1991 (stay away from the West Coast, Yellowstone Park and the Mississippi River and you should be all right). A similar shop is located at the U.S.G.S. National Center, 12201 Sunrise Valley Dr., Reston, VA; 703/648-5920.

Along with current Duck Stamps, the federal licenses required for duck hunting, the Federal Duck Stamp Office carries an array of merchandise -- shirts, mugs, hats, money clips, magnets, toy cars, pocketknives, coasters, mousepads -- emblazoned with Duck Stamp designs dating back to 1934. The National Park Service Public Information Office (Room 1013, open weekdays 9 to 3) offers free brochures on every unit of the NPS system.

NASA

Off the lobby of NASA's spiffy south-of-the-Mall headquarters -- no security check necessary -- the NASA Exchange has everything fit to print the NASA logo on: shirts, caps, medallions, backpacks, pens, golf balls, mousepads and much more. It also stocks patches commemorating every NASA space mission and a selection of inexpensive space-theme items that inflate (astronauts, space ships), glow in the dark (moon, planets, stars, Space Lace) or nourish (Official Astronaut Ice Cream Sandwich). Across the lobby, the NASA Headquarters Information Center sells NASA publications, from technical tomes such as "Time-Variable Phenomena in the Jovian System" ($52) to more accessible works on NASA history. Plenty of free publications, photos and posters are also available.

U.S. Postal Service
With the closure of the Philatelic Center at the U.S.P.S. L'Enfant Plaza headquarters, the Stamp Store in the National Postal Museum has become the motherlode of commemorative stamps and "stamp products." Self-service racks display commemorative issues honoring Legends of Hollywood (Lucille Ball, James Cagney), Amish quilts, Carnivorous Plants, Baseball's Legendary Playing Fields, among many others. Stamps honoring Peanuts and Looney Tunes characters and kid art appeal to young philatelists. The stamp products category encompasses postcards, notepads, stamp collector albums and Stamp Art collages (for $39.95 and up) of commemoratives and drawings themed to subjects ranging from classic American aircraft to Valentine's Day to adopting a child.

National Institutes of Health
The FAES (Foundation for Advanced Education in the Sciences), a postgraduate institute for scientists and doctors, runs a small bookstore in the basement of the Clinical Center, the most prominent building on the NIH campus. It features heavy-duty science and medical tomes, plus a sprinkling of local travel guides and some children's books. Around the corner, the NIH Recreation and Welfare Association R&W Gift Shop carries NIH-logo shirts, caps and trinkets, plus greeting cards, snacks and other convenience-store sundries. And in an outstanding example of viral marketing, it displays the Infectious Awareables line of 100 percent silk ties and scarves featuring colorful and eye-catching depictions of anthrax, E. Coli, herpes, TB, dental plaque, the plague or other bodacious bacilli.

World Bank
Operated by only a quasi-governmental agency and hardly hidden from public view, the large bookstore on the ground floor of World Bank headquarters specializes in esoteric material on international economics and development issues. Volumes are shelved under category headings like "Environment and Pollution Development" or "Labor and Income"; stacks of books such as "Rethinking the East Asia Miracle" and "Integrating Quantitative and Qualitative Research in Development Projects" fill the bestseller table. (Students and teachers with IDs get 20 percent off World Bank publications.) The shop also has a freebie cart outside (weather permitting), children's books in various languages, original artwork from client countries, plus World Bank logo apparel, pens, pencils, clocks and watches, key rings, and -- most aptly -- world globe stress balls.