Tucked amid the Lynnway's hustle and bustle, passing motorists might easily overlook Lancelot Janitorial and Paper Products, but those who stop and venture inside can experience the world of commercial cleaning at their fingertips.

Unlike an industrial warehouse that requires items be purchased by the dozens, or a department store that offers only one brand of broom, bucket and mop, Lancelot caters to walk-in customers as well as corporate clients, offering knowledge, service, variety and competitive prices.

Where else can you search for feather dusters and find three kinds - synthetic, lambs wool or ostrich feather?

"Lots of people buy the synthetic one because it's cheaper, but if you're dusting antiques or fragile items, the ostrich feathers are the way to go," says company owner George Sonia, 39, of Lynn, who began working at the store when he was 12.

An ostrich feather duster retails for about $16 and is ideal for cleaning silk lampshades and other delicates.

According to Sonia, connoisseurs of cleaning would know the value of a fine duster. "Ostrich feathers are usually gray or black. The gray feathers are smaller and come from immature birds, the black are from mature birds, so they last longer," he says, interrupting his explanation to wait on a woman in need of a sturdy mop with bucket and wringer.

After showing off the Cadillac of four-wheeled mop buckets, Sonia guides the woman down an aisle with a seemingly endless assortment of mop heads. Some of these cotton-strand wigs are for mopping floors, others for waxing. Mop heads that weigh a pound or more when dry are for bigger jobs, the lighter versions better suited to women or less-brawny men because they don't absorb as much water and so aren't as difficult to lift.

"Mop heads even come in different colors," says Sonia, noting that this helps keep the uncontaminated if assigned to a specific use.

Certainly mop heads and feather dusters have been around for centuries, but Lancelot isn't lingering in the past. At the front of the store are state-of-the-art backpack vacuum cleaners that weigh a mere 11 pounds but are powerful enough to inhale the most challenging mess. One model, the Pro-Team, retails for about $400 and performs an array of vacuuming tasks.

"If you ride by a building at night and look in at the cleaning crew, they'll be wearing these backpacks," says Sonia, adding that because of their relatively light weight, housewives have joined the ranks of appreciative cleaners.

Next to the backpack vacuums are more traditional push models, as well as swirling floor scrubbers, waxers and buffers, all commercial-grade and available for purchase or rental. "We also repair machines," he says.

Those in the market for protective gloves will find rubber, nitrile, latex and cloth varieties. As Sonia explains, latex gloves aren't much good to an auto mechanic because they dissolve when in contact with gasoline or other petroleum products. "The nitrile gloves don't fall apart, but they cost twice as much," he says.

Household pests will find no mercy among the products on Lancelot's shelves, such as rodent traps that kill by poisoning, or by gluing the prey in place as it scurries across a sticky pad, or ending its day between a lethal set of alligator-style snap jaws.

Products designed to destroy ants and roaches, and to eliminate skunk odor are also standard inventory.

Wire brushes, toilet brushes, paper sacks and plastic trash bags, soap dispensers and shovels, it's all part of the decidedly professional atmosphere at Lancelot, which got its start 50 years ago when Lance Kelley, stepson to former Lynn City Clerk Joseph Martin, began selling cleaning products from a site on Oxford Street where the Eastern Bank drive thru is now located.

Sonia notes Kelley was a family friend, which is how he came to join the staff at such a young age. "I started as a stock clerk, then moved on to truck driver, shipping and receiving manager, office manager, and finally, owner," says the father of two, whose wife, Stephanie, assists with the company bookkeeping.

When Eastern Bank built the drive-thru, Lancelot moved to Revere.

"When I bought the business 16 years ago, it was still in Revere. But with a little help from Eastern Bank and the EDIC (Lynn Economic Development and Industrial Corp.) I was able to bring it back to Lynn," says Sonia, adding that in 1995 the company recorded $36,000 in monthly sales. "Today, we're doing $135,000 a month, we've got 14 employees and the plan is to keep growing."

In Lynn again, Sonia first relocated to 757 Western Ave. and later to 760B on the same busy strip. Five years ago, he purchased the vacant building at 451 Lynnway, formerly home to GMC truck center, and has been happily ensconced there ever since.

Inside the new 6,000-square-foot building, the showroom is spacious, the products illuminated by natural light filtering through the plate glass windows facing the Lynnway, as well as by the overhead florescence.

The shelves are laden floor to ceiling with boxes of paper towels, toilet paper, dusting cloths, washing fluids, solvents and aerosols too numerous to mention.

Industrial-strength trash barrels and professional window washing equipment, such as the Golden Glove washer head that doesn't drip, help complete the picture, as do those wide dust brooms that every school kid would recognize, the kind janitors use in the wide corridors and on the gym floor. Wit an inventory of 2,500 products, an entire wall is devoted to a selection of mop and broom handles with attachments, including the Doodle Bug, which accepts scrubbers and scrapers and can be used at just about any angle.

"You can even do a ceiling cornier with the Doodle Bug," Sonia tells a woman who was bracing for the unwelcome task of scrubbing a cement-walled room before installing a photo studio in the J.B. Blood building.

Grateful for any tool that promised to make the job easier, the woman adopts the Doodle Bug and two scrub attachments along with advice on how best to use it.

"That's what we do. We listen and try to solve the problem," says Sonia. "We go the extra foot for them and it works. If they need delivery, we can do it the next day, and if it's a matter of price, we can usually match it. Some of our customers have been coming here for 20 years."

And some of them don't return empty handed, as evidenced by the Medieval knight-helmet ice buckets in the window and the armored statuary near the sales counter.

"People just bring us these things from garage sales or flea markets," says Sonia. "I think it's great."

For more information about Lancelot, call (781) 592-3170 or visit the website at www.lancelotjanitorial.com.