Frank Shay's Bookshop

Frank Shay opened his bookshop in October 1920 at 4 Christopher Street, in what had previously been the Columbia Cafe where John Masefield briefly worked as a bar-back in the mid-1890s.^[3] Another portion of the building functioned as an art studio owned by Winold Reiss until 1921, when Shay obtained the space and effectively doubled the size of his bookshop.^[4]

Until the door was rescued from Floyd Dell's old apartment, Frank Shay's office was separated from the rest of his bookshop by a thin sheet that hung in the doorway.^[3] Though Shay himself never admitted it, authors William McFee and Christopher Morley would eventually both write that Frank had taken the door for more privacy as several customers and friends had seen the silhouette of him drinking in his office after the prohibition had outlawed such activity.^[5]

The signatures began on the door before Shay even had the chance to repaint it, resulting in the large unpainted areas that remain on the door today. According to Christopher Morley, author Hendrik Willem van Loon was the first to sign the door; doing so spontaneously and accompanying his name with a doodle of a sailing ship.^[6] The earliest dated signatures, those of John Van Alstyne Weaver and Porter Garnett, were added on October 17, 1921.^[3]

Frank cultivated a creative environment in his bookshop that encouraged publishers, writers, artists, theater directors, actors, cartoonists, illustrators, political activists and more to socialize and gather at his shop. Shay went beyond selling books, going so far as to edit plays for other publishing houses, lecture on the importance of books and bookselling, create a circulating library, and put a great deal of effort into his award-winning window displays.^[4] In 1921, inspired by his friend Christopher Morley's 1917 novel Parnassus on Wheels, Shay modified a Ford truck for the purpose of mobile book selling.^[7]

Frank Shay's Bookshop shelves were lined with popular novels, children's books, socialist pamphlets and avant-garde chapbooks. He placed a particular emphasis on carrying the books of Walt Whitman and Joseph Conrad. Many early 20th-century booksellers expanded their businesses by adding publishing services and Frank Shay was no exception. The bookshop published a poetry magazine titled The Measure, the Salvo series of chapbooks, a local newspaper titled The Greenwich Villager, and numerous books and booklets of poetry, prose, and plays. The bookshop even printed their own set of branded stationery and envelopes.^[4] Frank Shay sold his bookshop sometime during the summer of 1924, after his wife (Fern Forrester Shay) gave birth to their daughter Jean. The family moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts shortly after, opening a new bookshop in the Cape Cod area under the same name as the original. The bookshop in New York City appeared as "The Greenwich Village Bookshop" several times before closing permanently approximately a year later. While delivering a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1931, author Christopher Morley said "It was too personal, too enchanting, too Bohemian a bookshop to survive indefinitely, but for five or six years it played a very real part in the creative life of New York City."^[8]

The original building that housed Frank Shay's Bookshop at 4 Christopher Street was demolished and replaced by a modern building sometime around 1960, less than a decade before the creation of the Greenwich Village Historic District would have protected it from destruction.^[9]

After the bookshop

Creditors acquired the full inventory and contents of the shop sometime during August 1925, as financial circumstances caused the bookshop to close. Shop manager Juliette Koenig noticed that the repossession crew had ignored the door, so she took it off of its hinges and enlisted several writers to bring it back to her apartment.^[3] Finding it interesting enough to protect with varnish and store in her house for more than three decades, Juliette Koenig Smith eventually sold the door to the University of Texas at Austin through an art dealer in 1960. At this time the door was accompanied by a list of approximately 25 identified signatures and a letter from Christopher Morley that thanked Juliette for rescuing the door.^[2] The original advertisement published in the Saturday Review read:

"Mrs. Frank Leon Smith has a door for sale. On the door are the autographs of about sixty people who in the early Twenties were important, famous, talented, unusual. I'm telling you, this is a fabulous door....Want a door? Ask Mrs. Smith at 321 East 52nd Street, New York 22."

— The Saturday Review, 1960

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin responded to the advertisement and purchased the door, subsequently allowing it to remain undisturbed in their collections for over a decade until a graduate student named Anna Lou Ashby discovered it in storage in 1972. While completing the first official research on the door, Ashby was able to identify 25 more signatures including those of Egmont Arens, Albert Boni, Robert Nathan, and Max Liebermann.^[3] After Ashby's brief research the door was again returned to storage where it remained for several more decades. The bookshop door was rediscovered again in 2008 and research was quickly organized by Molly Schwartzburg, a curator of literature at the University of Texas at Austin.^[1]

The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door: A Portal to Bohemia, 1920–1925

The Harry Ransom Center mounted The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door: A Portal to Bohemia, 1920–1925 exhibition from September 6, 2011, until January 22, 2012.^[10] The exhibition marked the first and thus far only public show to include the bookshop door, with curation headed by Molly Schwartzburg.^[7] For the duration of the exhibition The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door was installed in the middle of a gallery, on a custom blue base that exactly matched the color of the door. It was encased in plexiglas and anchored to the ceiling with steel wires for added security.^[11]

Historians at the Harry Ransom Center were able to use online photograph databases and collections in 2010 to prepare for the exhibition, relying on technology that was not available when the university first acquired the door in 1960. Curators educated themselves on twentieth-century penmanship techniques to correctly match signatures on the door to those found on original manuscripts, novels, poems, letters, drawings and more. Their diligence resulted in the identification of more than one hundred and fifty additional signatures.^[12]

The physical exhibition ran concurrently with a more in-depth online, virtual exhibit that was still accessible as of 2022.^[1] This online exhibit allowed viewers to learn more about each of the identified signatories and their connections to one another. The Harry Ransom Center continues to operate a website highlighting the door's yet unidentified signatures in hopes of using the public's assistance to eventually identify every signature on the door.^[13]

In 2012, the Harry Ransom Center was nominated for an Austin Critics' Table award for "Best Museum Exhibition" for their work on The Greenwich Valley Bookshop Door: A Portal to Bohemia exhibition. The Austin Critics' Table awards are a series of longstanding Austin awards that seek to honor those involved in all aspects of the local art scene.^[14]