SOME go there for the vegetarian pasta. Others pop in to pick up a portable Shakespeare. One woman meets all of her blind dates there.
Washington's Kramerbooks and Afterwords is one part bookstore, one part restaurant and perhaps one part singles bar. Offering everything from best sellers to the latest titles in the occult, the arts and government, as well as red and white wine, the Connecticut Avenue shop has been a cultural institution in Washington for more than a decade.
It is perhaps the only place in the district where people who work or live on Capitol Hill can be found nose to nose with young communists in biker shorts flipping through Naomi Wolf's "The Beauty Myth." It may also be the only bookstore around that offers live music on a stage above the cookbooks.
"Kramerbooks is a cultural landmark of sorts," said Helen Winternitz, a Washington author whose most recent book (with Timothy M. Phelps) is "Capitol Games" (Hyperion, 1992). "Everybody who reads or drives a cab knows of it."
Many people do not consider themselves true Washingtonians until they have received a phone call that begins as an invitation for drinks after work and ends with, "I'll meet you at Kramer's."
All the elements of a good time are at Kramer's, as its patrons call it. The bar is sequestered between two tiers of fiction, and crowds gather there to drink beer and contemplate Proust. The row of self-help books is near the kitchen. One could practically make cappuccino while pondering "The Dance of Anger" by Harriet Lerner.
Looking up briefly from a furious flip through James Baldwin's "Amen Corner," you may espy the grill. If a hankering for a nacho platter hits, you could pay for the paperback and dash into the restaurant out back. Or perhaps you have just picked up a Hemmingway anthology and feel an immediate need to sit down, order a bottle of red wine and become witty.
One woman said she makes a habit of meeting all her blind dates in the shop. "It is a very comfortable place if you are meeting someone for the first time," said Susan, who did not want to give her last name.
For eight years, Mitch Brown has managed the store, at 1517 Connecticut Avenue near Dupont Circle. "What makes us unique is our diverse clientele," Mr. Brown said. "It is really rare to get people from Potomac mixing with people from Adams Morgan."
Rae Parr-Moore, a freelance publicist who has been frequenting Kramer's for 15 years, said she liked to take her clients there. "It is just full of journalists, writers and neighborhood folk," she added.
Sometimes, romance can be found among the shelves.
"This is definitely a pickup spot," Mr. Brown said. "If you're gay, straight, whatever, this is the place." Indeed, on any given night -- or right through the weekend, when its doors do not close -- patrons can be seen chatting it up over the latest in hard covers. "People meet out in the bookstore, and then they can go back into the restaurant and get a table," he said.
Consider these scenes, from last Tuesday night:
* A middle-aged man sees a woman perusing a travel guide to Italy. Sidling up quietly, he reads over her shoulder until she notices him; then he initiates a rapid-fire confabulation on the hotels of Tuscany.
* A young man in a leather jacket, spotted only moments earlier flipping through a book of "The Far Side" cartoons, gazes at another man browsing in a section of the store decidely more academic. Putting down the cartoons, he grabs a copy of Joseph Campbell's "Occidental Mythology," leans against a shelf and strives to look casual.
* A roundish man in glasses standing next to a woman wearing a headband and reading a William Safire tome of political speeches, says, "You know, that book is nothing if it doesn't have lots of Churchill." He pulls the book from her hands and looks for Churchill speeches. "Aha!" he exclaims. "There it is!" The woman nods, saying nothing.
* A willowy woman buried in an Anais Nin book looks up slyly and winks at no one in particular.
"People in Washington looking to cure intellectual or personal loneliness go in there," Ms. Winternitz said. "I myself have gone in there for those reasons."
Mr. Brown said a couple who met in Kramer's a few years ago were recently married. Another famous Washington pair, whom he would describe only as "an extremely well-known Hill couple," started their divorce there. "They started fighting over drinks, and a few weeks later papers were served," he said.
Of course, many people couldn't care less about meeting a potential mate in the store or getting a salad or a beer. They go there simply for the printed word.
"I love this place because I can come in here, pick up a book and start it right away," said LaShann Jones, a 22-year-old law student at Howard University. "They have lots of books that are not found in more conventional bookstores. I am interested in African-American and feminist literature, for instance."
Miroslav Prokopec, a 69-year-old fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, also does not go there to socialize. Last Tuesday evening, he pulled up a stool in the middle of the nonfiction aisle and began to plow through "Bones: A Forensic Detective Casebook" by Dr. Douglas Ubelaker.
"This place is so great because they are incredibly organized," he said. "I walked in and I told the gentleman, 'I want "Bones," ' and five steps later, I had it."
The shop, owned by William Kramer, David Tenney and Henry Posner, has been a neighborhood fixture since 1976. It is open Monday through Thursday from 7:30 A.M. to 1 A.M., and weekends from 7:30 A.M. Friday until 1 A.M. Monday. In warm weather people can drink iced espresso and read Le Monde on the 19th Street sidewalk, on the restaurant side of the store.
"We are definitely an institution," Mr. Brown said. "There is not a place like it here. It is known throughout the town, almost entirely through word of mouth."
Of course, anything worth knowing in Washington almost always is.
Photo: Rae Parr-Moore, left, and Mona Henoch, a Kramerbooks waitress. (Stephen Crowley/The New York Times)
