People are timid about pawnshops. They see the cases of gold jewelry, the guitars hanging from the ceiling, the shelves of cameras and guns. It's tantalizing but also forbidding.

"I've looked in pawnshops but never gone in," says Annette Sloan, a college teacher in Scranton, Pa. "You figure they're full of things that were dear to someone--Aunt Lily's brooch--but you're intimidated, both by the look of the place and the merchandise. It's like following the hearse, benefiting from the hardship that brought the person to the pawnshop in the first place and then kept them from coming back."

Historically, the pawnshop image is equally mixed: People have heard the story of Queen Isabella pawning her jewelry to finance Columbus' voyage to the New World. They think of gold gambled, gold sought, riches waiting.

But they also remember Rod Steiger as "The Pawnbroker" in 1965, grimly doling out cash to desperate people. They hear the stuff may be stolen. They note that pawnshops aren't on the best boulevards.

Now we're hearing about upscale pawnshops catering to the chic, about chains of clean, well-lit places in Middle America's malls, about pawnshops as virtual boutiques full of recession bargains. You could do your Christmas shopping there.

Sure, and I'm Queen Isabella.

Pawnshops are no boutiques--not then, not now. They may sell off the unredeemed goods, but not always to consumers and not always at bargain prices. They're basically moneylenders, and on the far periphery of the field. If pawnshops had, as loosely estimated, a billion dollars in loans outstanding at the end of last year, it's still minute--half of 1%--compared to the $166 billion carried on bank cards.

What's new is an active industry trade association, which in six years has built its membership to 1,500 of the 10,000-plus pawnshops nationwide. In addition, five pawnshop chains have gone public since 1987, with some fanfare. Texas-based Cash America, the largest, has 233 pawnshops in the United States and Britain and a listing on the New York Stock Exchange, and it wants to broaden the market, from downtowns to suburbs, from blue-collar to middle-income, from borrowing to buying.

It sure looks like a growth industry. Pawnshops declined when credit cards and automated-teller machines began providing almost universal access to cash and credit, then multiplied when banks abandoned low-income neighborhoods and discouraged small customers with new fees and charges. More than ever, pawnshops are important as "banks for the little man," wrote economist John Caskey in a 1989 study, "Pawnbroking in America."