At home with the Black Cat: Where families grew and an artist worked, now home to 10,000 books

Do you love secondhand bookstores, but hate that most of them look like a bomb went off a few minutes before you arrived?

And you look forward to happily killing time browsing in the stacks, but begin choking immediately on the dust of the ages floating in the air?

Then head for Black Cat Books, where the air is fresh, the shelves and stacks organized and it’s filled with light.

Don’t judge this bookstore by its cover. The entrance to the Black Cat looks like it will be more book closet than shop, set off Route 114 in the Center. But open the door of the trim wooden building and the place opens out to a spacious sitting room surrounded by shelves and comfortable leather couches. One rack has secondhand CDs of jazz, classical and opera.

A passageway of bookshelves leads to another high-ceilinged room with stacks of books — there are more than 10,000 in the place — with a view at the rear of a small garden.

Here you’ll find Michael Kinsey, co-owner with his wife, Dawn Hedberg, usually at work on the computer, updating the extensive online catalogue. The Black Cat ships books all over the world, Mr. Kinsey said, and “we buy books nearly every day, from one book to whole libraries.”

The Kinseys opened their first secondhand bookstore in Sag Harbor in 1996 and used the distinctive and quirky structure on North Ferry Road as a warehouse for books in their overflowing inventory. They bought the house next door and about six years ago turned the warehouse into their retail store.

Phyllis Wallace, archivist at the Shelter Island Historical Society, found records that the house was owned by Homer Griffing in 1916 and then by William Sandwald.

Part of the house had been rented out over the years, and the Kinseys still have people coming in to share memories. It had been an artist’s studio and was known around town as an  impromptu dry dock for a large boat out front that always seemed to be in various stages of completion.

“A neighbor told us about a guy who used to use that tree,” Mr. Kinsey, pointed out the back window, “as target practice with his guns.”

There are treasures here from the past. Mr. Kinsey took down a large book written by the philosopher Francis Bacon, and pointing to the bottom of the title page: “Printed by S.G. and B.G. for W. Lee, London, 1671.”

At random he brought down a small, beautifully preserved first edition of Lewis Carroll’s poems, and nodded toward a first edition of Ron Hubbard’s first novel, “when he was a science fiction writer and not a religious leader,” Mr. Kinsey said.

Nearby was a volume that only a shop like the Black Cat would have — a book owned by the German ambassador to China during the Boxer rebellion in the early 1900s, who was killed by Chinese revolutionaries.

“Irony,”Mr. Kinsey said. “His book survived but he didn’t.” He added that there was a double irony, translating the book’s title: “Customs of the Chinese.”

But for those not in the market for collector’s items, the shop has bargain basement prices on contemporary fiction and nonfiction, plus photography and art books,

Upstairs there’s an extensive vinyl record collection along with prints, old photographs and postcards, all presented in an orderly and spotless fashion. Especially fun is a collection of old pulp fiction paperbacks, with cover illustrations in lurid color of gorgeous molls in several stages of distress.

On one shelf are books perfect for gifts for the book fiend on your list; handsome, leather bound, signed copies of authors such as Doctorow and Mailer, going for only $20 or $30 a copy.

Why “Black Cat?”

The name comes from an actual feline, a black cat the owners had for 21 years. His name was “Ubik,” which comes from a novel, Mr. Kinsey said.

It means “everything, all at once, like the word ubiquitous,” the bookseller added, surrounded, everywhere, by books.