Take a Woolly Mammoth Home This Christmas : Business: Dinosaur tree ornaments are just some of the offbeat and unusual items for sale at museum shops. Just like Sears and the Broadway, these stores depend on holiday buyers to boost their annual revenues.

‘Tis the season to be shopping, and the Westside’s museum shops, like their less cultured cousins, the department stores, have stocked up for the holidays.

The three stores in the 5800 and 5900 blocks of Wilshire Boulevard are filled with merchandise calculated to catch the eye of both the visitor who drops in after touring the exhibits and the loyal patron who knows museum shops to be a source for beautiful, educational and unusual gifts, cards and wrapping papers.

For some, browsing the museum shops is the best part of a trip to Los Angeles. “I live in Orange County, but when I come up I always make it a point to visit the museum shops and find new things,” Miriam Rosen of Fullerton said in the store of the Craft and Folk Art Museum at the corner of Wilshire and Curson. Rosen likes the stores because they carry offbeat merchandise. Her daughter Evy said she likes them, too, but thinks their prices are too high.

Just like Sears and the Broadway, the museum stores depend on holiday buyers to boost their annual revenues. How well the stores do in the critical gift-buying weeks before Hanukkah and Christmas will be a major factor in how much money they are able to hand over to their parent institutions.

And so the shops are ready. The Craft and Folk Art Museum store has hand-made Santas as well as Christmas tree lights shaped like chili peppers.

Across the street at the George C. Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries in Hancock Park, the fossil-minded shopper can pick up a woolly mammoth ornament to hang on the Christmas tree. And at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art next door, the merchandise appropriate for gift-giving includes blown Venetian glass that looks like pieces of cellophane-wrapped hard candy.

“Ninety percent of our profit is made in the holiday season,” said Lorraine Trippett, business manager of the craft museum.

In a typical year, she said, the shop contributes between $30,000 and $60,000 to the museum, about 10% of its operating budget. But this year has been anything but typical for the institution. The museum shop was closed over the summer, as was the museum itself. Construction gets under way on new quarters, scheduled to open in 1992. The craft museum recently opened an exhibit in temporary space on the fourth floor of the Wilshire/Fairfax May Co., and the shop reopened Nov. 21 in a former real-estate office.

This year, Trippett said, the shop will do well to break even. But it is more important than ever as an embodiment of the values of the museum. For the shop, she explained, “We select things that are in the marketplace now that are the kinds of things that are in our museum and that we might show. Particularly at this time, it is a way for us to keep our face before the public.”

Among the one-of-a-kind pieces in the shop is a wall hanging done in patchwork and embroidery ($600) that tells a story in the traditional style of the Hmong people of Vietnam by artist See Lee, who now lives in Long Beach. Another of Lee’s hangings is in the museum’s permanent collection.

According to shop manager Carol Day, most of the merchandise is much less pricey. Her favorites this year include fanciful lizards, turtles and spider-like creatures made of acrylic polymer by Los Angeles artist Dan Kuffel. The simplest are $18.

Doll collectors regularly come by, Day said, and this year the shop has increased its offerings for them. On hand are Victorian-looking Santas and other Christmas dolls by Ruth De Nicola ($125-$225), and clay dolls with animal faces and Asian-style clothing by Carol Krieger of Santa Barbara ($100). The shop also carries Krieger’s one-of-a-kind story dolls ($125-$225).

Day said the store has upped its number of art books (“The Spirit of Folk Art” is selling well at $60). It has dozens of traditional African, Mexican and Indonesian masks--made to sell but not reproductions--for $60 to $350. It is also carrying unusually shaped tea sets and other work by Australian ceramic artist Jiri Bures. His cookie jar in the form of a spotted leopard with camel-like humps is $110.

Recognizing the current craze for things Southwestern, the shop has strings of red-pepper Christmas tree lights ($15) and chili pepper ornaments made of glass ($5.50). Artist Tom Freese of Santa Fe made the painted wooden pins featuring the ubiquitous Southwestern snake ($12-$18).

According to Patricia Caspary, president of the 1,400-member Museum Store Assn., museum shops are traditionally expected to carry merchandise that “supports the museum experience and enhances visitors’ understanding of the institution.” (Caspary manages the store at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Newport Beach.)

That mission presents a problem for the shop at the Page Museum at the La Brea tar pits. The museum houses the world’s largest collection of Ice Age fossils. What it doesn’t house are dinosaur bones. The dinosaur was extinct millennia before mastodons and saber-toothed cats began to get stuck in the asphalt.

“A couple of years ago, a large percentage of our merchandise was dinosaurs,” said shop manager Genevieve Goff. “We’ve been trying to winnow it down and put the emphasis on mammals. Unfortunately, there’s not that much fun merchandise devoted to mammals.”

It would be retail suicide to ban dinosaurs in the child-oriented shop. Shoppers too young to tie their own shoes manage to lisp out requests for Pteranodon and Tyrannosaurus rex. Goff sells boxes and boxes of little plastic dinosaurs at 30 cents each. But she is always on the lookout for more appropriate merchandise. Her recent finds include a large saber-toothed cat hand puppet that manages to be both cute and menacing ($29.95) and a plush woolly mammoth created by the Smithsonian Institution ($22).

Although “paleomarketing” isn’t easy, Goff occasionally gets lucky. She and a colleague were attending a gift show when they discovered European-made Christmas tree ornaments in the shape of two of the La Brea animals, the woolly mammoth and the ground sloth. “We had to do a double take,” Goff recalled. “Who would ever make these? Who would ever sell these except us?” The ornaments have been a hit at $5.95 each. “We were real glad to find them,” she said.

The Page Museum is a branch of the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, which has three shops in the museum in Exposition Park (including one devoted to dinosaurs). According to Mark Rodriguez, chief deputy director of the natural history museum, the shops provide the museum with about $325,000 a year, 10% of its operating budget. The Page Museum shop generates about half that amount.

With holiday gift-giving in mind, the shop has stocked geodes from Mexico, rock and crystal formations that sell for $8.95 to $29.95, and sandstone spheres from Utah that cost from $14 to $54, depending on their size. “They make really good men’s gifts,” Goff said. She also brought in more American Indian-inspired jewelry and ordered vases and other crystal objects hand-etched with designs taken from Native American petroglyphs ($40-$125).

Goff said the museum’s best-selling, big-ticket item is a life-sized cast of a saber-toothed skull that costs $225. The museum sells several dozen a year, she said, a surprising number as wedding gifts.

Although adult buyers are important to the shop, its typical patron is a child whose allowance is burning a hole in purse or pocket. Sales surge whenever school is out. As a result, July and August are the store’s biggest months, followed by spring break. Goff caters to her clients by grouping inexpensive souvenirs together and pricing a number of popular items, including little gemstone rings and polished stones, at 94 cents, bringing the cost to an even dollar with tax. Children are welcome to read the books and take items from the shelves to get a better look. “The staff spends a lot of time straightening up,” Goff said.

Many of the young shoppers are surprisingly flush. Staff will often look over a young customer’s pile of chosen merchandise and express concern about the cost, Goff said. “We say, ‘Oh, honey, that’s going to be $13,’ and they hand us a $20 bill.”

Marlene Kristoff, who manages the shop and its satellites at LACMA, speculates that shoppers believe museum-store shopping makes a positive statement about them. “I think people are interested in giving gifts from a museum because it shows they are interested in culture,” she said. “It reflects well on them.”

Kristoff said that the holiday season is always a good one for the shop, matched or surpassed in sales only by major exhibits. “Georgia O’Keeffe will probably be bigger this year than Christmas,” she predicted, alluding to this summer’s exhibit of paintings by the wildly popular Southwestern artist who died in 1986.

Like most museum shops, LACMA is interested in developing what the museum-shop business calls “related merchandise,” posters and other items that grow out of the museum’s collections and exhibits. Kristoff said LACMA is scrupulous in its production of postcards and other objects that feature artistic images from the collection. All paper reproductions are corrected for color by comparison with the original works, she said. Among the many O’Keeffe items for sale at the shop are museum-developed notes bearing an image of O’Keeffe poppies, manufactured by Crane ($15 for a box of 10, $18 with holiday greeting).

A biography of O’Keeffe and “Georgia O’Keeffe in the West” ($100) are also selling well, Kristoff said.

The museum has developed a number of new items for its upcoming show on the romance of the Taj Mahal, which opens Dec. 17 in the Hammer Building. The book on the show, which will have its own little shop, is expected to do well at $29.95 in soft cover, $45 in hardcover.

The LACMA store has many holiday items, including an extensive collection of gift papers, cards and wrappings, handblown glass ornaments by artist Paul Harrie, Advent calendars, mobiles and note pads in Christmas shapes. It also carries children’s toys, games and books. Gift items this season include Venetian glass “candies” that sell for $10. “Some people have gone as far as buying 20 pieces for a bowl for a cocktail table,” Kristoff said.

“We have items at every price point from 50 cents to several thousand dollars,” Kristoff said. Jewelry is always popular, beginning at $10 for Chinese cloissone pins to $2,500 for some of the Indian and Southeast Asian pieces. Framed posters, which start at $37.50, are perennial bestsellers (posters framed with Plexiglas can be shipped). This year art related videos ($29.95-$89.95) are also doing well, especially the video on Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.

The LACMA shops generate about $300,000 a year, 1% of the museum’s operating budget. According to museum spokeswomanPamela Jenkinson, that is significantly less than the 3% to 5% contribution made by shops, notably that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, that have mail-order catalogues.

All three shops are open Tuesdays through Sundays and offer 10% discounts to museum members.