Wallpaper makes the background, rather than the main attraction of a room. But at Secondhand Rose, the reverse is true: wallpaper is front and center. The store, which bills itself as the largest seller of antique wallpaper in the world, occupies the first two floors of a cast-iron storefront on Duane Street in TriBeCa. Though it also trades in antiques and furniture, Secondhand Rose’s specialty is wallpaper — 50,000 rolls of it, lining the back of the store and filling a second-story attic.

The owner, Suzanne Lipschutz, opened the store in 1963 as a general antiques shop. It wasn’t until years later, after she bought a house in upstate New York, that she began collecting roll upon roll of wallpaper. “The house had a lot of old wallpaper on the walls,” Ms. Lipschutz said. “I had to renovate the house, and I had to knock the walls down to do it. I got very upset about what I was losing.”

She made up for her loss later with a discovery of a cache of old papers at a hardware store in the Catskills. And the collection began to grow.

Most of Secondhand Rose’s stock is American dating from between 1860 and 1970. Some are hand-printed designs. Others are mass-produced. Some are European. At the shop, papers are organized by pattern and material: scenic, floral, silver, gold, chinoiserie, stripe, plaid, square, geometric, faux grass, real grass, and faux finish. Each pattern is its own cross section of design history. Flora, for instance, goes all the way from the curling, slightly sinister flowers of Art Nouveau to the psychedelic patterns of the 1960s.

For those whose taste runs to recent decades, there is a selection of novelty and vintage papers with motifs such as cowboys, baseball players, and race cars. Secondhand Rose also has a selection of Mylar wallpaper from the ’70s (think disco), and, for those inclined to cover a different surface, linoleums from the ’50s and earlier.

Prices for a double roll (which is the standard unit of wallpaper and contains approximately 60 square feet) begin at $100 and can reach $400. The store’s most expensive — and famous — paper is an original Frank Lloyd Wright design. Produced by the F. Schumacher & Co. in 1956, the Taliesen Line of Decorative Fabrics and Wallpaper costs $1,200 per roll.

What you won’t find at Secondhand Rose are reproductions of contemporary papers. The closest this shop comes to reproductions are papers from the ’20s that imitate designs from the 19th century. “Some of these are hand-screened papers. Some have 20 colors,” Ms. Lipschutz said. “You can’t reproduce those. Once they’re gone, they’re gone for good.”

For a full roll of antique wallpaper to have survived, it had to have sat in a specific kind of neglect. Attics are too dry. Basements are too wet. The best finds are usually in the storerooms of old hardware and paint stores.

Along with homeowners, Secondhand Rose sells to window dressers and interior decorators who use the old papers as backdrops. It also sells to film and television set decorators “usually for the flashbacks,” the store manager, Martin Dinowitz, said. A wall’s worth of ’60s French paper was recently featured — in fact, torn down — on the period television show “Swingtown,” he said.

“People are returning to wallpaper. They’re getting tired of white, white walls. They want to finish their loft or home with something that adds comfort and warmth,” Mr. Dinowitz said. “People remember going to their grandparents’ house, or the house they grew up in. Now they’re 40 and they want to re-create that look.”

Gregory Herringshaw, the assistant curator of the Cooper-Hewitt’s department of wall coverings — the largest in America — said Secondhand Rose’s stock of ’50s and ’60s papers is particularly strong. And that’s important for the future. Those papers once decorated the living rooms, kitchens, and bathrooms of America’s split-level ranch and suburban cul-de-sac houses. As with everything, they will have their day, he predicts. “Someday all those houses from the ’50s will be restored,” Mr. Herringshaw said. “Eventually they will be the rarities that the great master papers are.”

Secondhand Rose, 138 Duane St., between West Broadway and Church Street, 212-393-9002.