Death Becomes Her--and Keeps Her Business Booming : Books: Brooklyn is home for a publisher who offers 1,500 titles on a bottomless subject.

Death and whimsy. For Roberta Halporn, a natural combination.

“You either laugh or you cry,” she says.

Halporn is sitting in a straight chair in her snug store, a former storefront church whose arched windows filter the light of a rainy afternoon through frosted panes.

The chair is low, which suits her; she is perhaps 5 feet tall, a size that helped when she was a dancer but has hindered her since: The usual prejudice of banks against making business loans to women is heightened, she says, when the woman is short.

Halporn is a speck of vivid life in a large roomful of death. Books about death and dying line the walls. Tombstone rubbings fill the closets and framed ones adorn the walls. Stacks of postcards offer death-themed recipes: Mexican Pan de Muertos, an old New York-Dutch Funeral Pie, an Armenian Soup to Save a Dead Soul.

Shelves in a standing coffin hold a mix of small objects that tend toward humor: a small stuffed Dracula doll; a skeletal hand that seems to beckon; a bumper sticker that says, “I Brake for Old Graveyards”; a pair of fuzzy slippers made to look like graves--turf-green bottoms, fresh-earth brown tops, gray tombstone tongues with “Over the Hill” printed like an epitaph.

Death as livelihood: Welcome to the Center for Thanatological Research, a fixture on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn since 1980. It is, in terms of sales volume, a small-press publishing house wed to a mail-order book business. The whimsical things--what Halporn calls “the popular stuff”--is a much smaller part of her operation.

But everything focuses on thanatology: “The study of aging, dying, death, bereavement and recovery,” in Halporn’s succinct definition.

Halporn, it should be noted, is not death-obsessed. She is not morbid, not ghoulish, not gloomy. Death neither delights nor threatens her. It interests her as a scholar, as a businesswoman and, she believes, as a person who suffered an early loss.

This last--the death of her father when she was 5 years old, followed by the death six years later of the uncle with whom she had gone to live--is what sets her among a group of people, mostly academics, counselors and writers, who deal with death.

“I’ve thought about this,” she says. “I’ve met all the pioneers in this field. We were all in our late teens when World War II stopped and the death camps were opened. We had dropped the Bomb and knew we could commit global suicide. The other thing was, 90% of them had lost someone while they were young.”

The best-known of these pioneers is probably Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a prolific author whose works include “On Death and Dying” and “On Children and Dying.”

Halporn has sent out several specialized catalogues of books, and these give an idea of how large and varied the field is: Her “Widowhood and Related Issues” list has almost 100 titles. “Administering Death by Law” has more than 170, ranging the alphabet from “Abortion & Infanticide” to “Youth Suicide.” She keeps her list pruned to about 1,500 titles (of about 5,000 available from 500 publishers) and tells customers she will special-order any book that is in print.

Halporn began her professional life as a modern dancer. She had her own dance troupe and she choreographed three off-Broadway shows.

“I grew up in Brooklyn,” she says. “Went to NYU. I was a pre-med student and I would have been a good doctor, except I couldn’t multiply. Which was death in chemistry.” She went on with a self-designed humanities major and eventually got a master’s degree.

She turned away from academics to dance, supplementing her income by teaching dance in adult education programs in Queens schools. “I was doing really well,” she recalls. “I had a car. I was making a living dancing.”

Both jobs ended when a robust male partner tossed her over his head and, on landing, she broke a bone in her foot. She could neither dance nor drive to her classes with a cast on her leg. “I ran into debt,” she says. “I was heartbroken. I really felt I had my hand on the ladder of success as a choreographer.”

When she was able to look for work, she did not mention dance. “I told people about the master of arts in education,” she says. “If you tell people you’re a dancer, oh, you’re the lowest. Dancers are almost as low as opera singers, who don’t run to great intellect.”

She ended up working at Macmillan Inc., the publishing house, handling the foreign sales of books. That was in 1961.

A few years and a few publishing jobs later, she became promotion director for Law Arts, a Varick Street publisher then gearing up to do a series of books on entertainment-industry law. The owner, Abraham Meilen, asked her first to sort out another project: a line of books on death and dying. She thought it was an odd and bad idea. Her misgivings soon vanished, to be replaced by enthusiasm for the subject.

By 1978, she was ready to go out on her own.

“I was a single parent,” she says. “I had my daughter’s first year of college tuition in the bank. I could afford to do something new. I decided I was going to set up a company of my own and draw a circle around this small market. Build the complete mousetrap. I knew how to produce a book, how to publish a book and how to write a book.”

In her first year, her gross sales were $5,000 and all of her inventory fit nicely in the basement. By the third year, the inventory was scattered in spare rooms all over the neighborhood and the apartment was bursting. “It was either expand or close,” Halporn says. She bought the Atlantic Avenue building with an inherited $15,000 as a down payment.

Her fourth-year gross was $160,000. She took that number to the banks. “I had a track record, I employed four people, I was spending X amount of money, I was running a book club, paying salaries. All this with no outside capital. The banks told me: ‘Go away, lady. You’re crazy.’ ”

She stops halfway between anger and resignation. “Well, they didn’t use those words, of course, but that’s what they meant,” she says.

“Banks hate bookstores. To them a book is worth five cents. It’s nothing. They can’t see that there’s a guaranteed interest in this strange subject.”

Halporn’s subject puts such things as banks and money in perspective and there are lessons for anyone who visits.

What, after all, are we to compare with the experience of William and Sarah Langley, whose names adorn an immense tombstone rubbing on Halporn’s wall?

The broad stone has six divisions, one for each Langley child laid to rest beneath it. Three were named Sarah.

“Then let my murmuring Heart cheer up with this,” the stone says. “They with their Saviour art in endless bliss.”

“It’s from the Common Burying Ground in Newport,” Halporn says quietly.

“A wonderful place.”