Crown Antiques is not so much a store as a garage sale to the nth power -- four floors and a basement so full of stuff that flat surfaces are mostly a rumor.

Baruch Hyman, the owner, has been in the Uptown building at 1018 Fifth Ave. for 11 years, spending nine years on Murray Avenue in Squirrel Hill before that.

He is 48 and has been a collector "from the time I could talk and walk,'' he said. As a boy in St. Louis, he collected stamps and his father, Leonard, collected coins. Then his dad got hooked on political buttons and the two of them began haunting flea markets. Soon, the boy was collecting comic books and sports memorabilia and, well, you could say it got a little out of hand.

He figures he has 40,000 comic books, give or take the 1970s-era "Casper'' and "Spooky'' I found for my daughters yesterday. He has about 4 million items in all.

The story of how Mr. Hyman found himself in this racket meanders this way and that, like any good walk through his gargantuan shop.

He moved to Pittsburgh 21 years ago from Des Moines, after four years in Israel where he studied, became a rabbi and met and married his wife, Taibke. They returned to the United States, becoming just another one of those Israel-to-Iowa couples because he'd gone to Drake University in Des Moines and thought he'd buy the kosher butcher shop there.

That didn't work out, but a man in Richmond, Va., called and suggested he open a kosher shop there. So he and his wife, originally from Uniontown, drove to Richmond to check out the scene.

On the way back, they stopped in Morgantown, W.Va., where her father had a furniture store, and spent some time in Uniontown and Pittsburgh. This city suited them far more than the old Confederate capital or the harder-edged neighborhoods they'd seen in Philadelphia and New York.

Here were kosher butchers, kosher bakeries and men who looked like him. "Here people smile when they see you on the street ... Coming to Pittsburgh from Des Moines was like coming to Jerusalem.''

He had only enough stuff then to fill up a Ford Escort, but the collecting bug went from being a weekend hobby to his livelihood when he began renting a small storefront in Squirrel Hill. Now, he says, "I don't collect any of this stuff anymore. I just collect the stories.''

Price tags are rare and when a customer asks about an item, the answer can be anywhere from pennies to thousands of dollars. Mr. Hyman likes the give-and-take, likes learning as he collects. He believes his collection of photographs by Teenie Harris, the great visual historian of the Hill District, is surpassed only by the Carnegie Museum's. He has a lot of African-American memorabilia, but he can't be pinned down to one interest. (You can browse online at www.crownantiques.com.)

Board games, cameras, radios, toy cars, electric fans, ancient bottles, 19th-century penny-farthing bicycles and sewing machines, glassware, jewelry, baseball cards, stamps, coins, thousands of books and record albums, tens of thousands of post cards, photos, movie posters, newspapers and magazines. His collection of TV Guides alone would blow away that of Mr. Costanza of "Seinfeld."

"Nobody else in the whole city, I'm pretty confident to say, will have a collection like that,'' he said, pointing to dozens of candy boxes dating to a time when a Baby Ruth was a nickel and an Almond Joy a dime.

He opens at 11 a.m. most days and is open every day but Saturday. He understands there was a time decades ago when that stretch of Fifth Avenue was lined with Jewish wholesalers and it was about the only place in town where business was done on Sundays.

Now the city's rhythms follow a different pattern. This past Sunday, "After the hockey game started, I don't think one person walked in.''

It was about then that I asked my stupidest question. Was coming to work still fun for him?

"If it wasn't,'' he said, "why would I come?"