Nine lives dept.: bookstore cat.(The Talk of the Town)(Gotham Book Mart's cat)

The first time Andreas Brown, the owner of the Gotham Book Mart, laid eyes on his enormous orange tabby cat, it was chasing three smaller cats around his sister's house in San Diego and pursuing an occasional seagull up and down her porch steps. "I had to have him," Brown said the other day. "And so, about four years ago, when my sister moved, she agreed to send him to me by air." The cat was flown non-stop from California to J.F.K. in a pet carrier in the cargo hold. His new owner met him at the airport and took him in a taxi to his new residence, on West Forty-seventh Street.

Frances Steloff, the founder of the Gotham Book Mart, from whom Brown bought the shop in 1967, always had cats, and left money to half a dozen animal organizations when she died, in 1989, at the age of a hundred and one. Her last three cats had literary names -- Thornton (Wilder), Christopher (Morley), and Mitchell (Kennerley). Brown decided to call his huge new tomcat Pynchon.

When Pynchon came East, the Gotham was down to one cat -- Mitchell, who died a few months later. The shop became a one-cat bookstore again. "He's plenty to deal with," Brown said.

Pynchon has the run of the five-floor building, which houses the shop, a gallery, storage space, and Brown's apartment. He is the perfect bookstore cat. He purrs when customers pet him. He poses for photographs dressed in T-shirts or tuxedos designed for dogs, and wearing a graduation cap or a sombrero or whatever else the staff puts on him. He attends meetings of the James Joyce Society, which are held in the second-floor gallery.

Because Pynchon arrived in New York with no front claws, he became an indoor cat. His most notable outings since then were in the winter of 1999. Brown, egged on by his staff and proud of his wondrous green-eyed, pink-nosed acquisition, entered him in the domestic-house-pet division of the annual cat show at Madison Square Garden. As Brown ...