viz.

Please note, the opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

“To clarify, the door likely didn’t come into the collection randomly,” explains Molly Schwartzburg, Curator of British and American Literature at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. The door that she is talking about, of course, is Frank Shay’s bookshop door, which is currently featured in the Ransom Center’s interesting new exhibit, The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door: A Portal to Bohemia, 1920-1925. “We don’t have many details,” continues Schwartzburg, “but it appears that the owner of the door, who had been the shop’s last manager, decided that after thirty-five years of keeping the door in her home, she was ready to sell it.” The Ransom Center subsequently acquired the door through Lew David Feldman, a dealer who suspected that the Center might be interested because of their extensive Christopher Morley collection. Molly Schwartzburg graciously agreed to chat with viz. blog about Frank Shay’s bookshop door, and its accompanying exhibition.

Before anyone was thinking about an installation at the Harry Ransom center, Schwartzburg was thinking Frank Shay’s bookshop door might make an interesting online resource. She explains that up until 2009, the door was housed in an “off-site storage space used almost entirely [by the Ransom Center] for art collection materials.” When the off-site storage space was emptied, Schwartzburg was asked to consider where an object such as Frank Shay’s bookshop door might be better stored. “The minute I saw [the door] and read the dealer’s description,” Schwartzburg explains, “I knew it would be an interesting online exhibition.” Schwartzburg was attracted by the door’s vivid blue color, the hundreds of signatures, its cartoons, and its narrow, “old-fashioned” dimensions. Readers of viz. are encouraged to explore the online component here, and discover the door through the exhibition’s fantastic website. Visitors to the Ransom Center are encouraged to explore the door’s literary past through an accompanying touch-screen monitor.

Schwartzburg explains that the touch-screen “is much larger than the gallery exhibition in the sense that it contains more artifacts and a lot more curatorial text. Most of [the Center’s] touch-screens serve to highlight certain items in an exhibition…but in this case, the touch-screen is not just enrichment.” Visitors can electronically explore a range of texts associated with the exhibit. As can be seen in the above video, many of these pages are designed to resemble their content. Schwartsburg explains that the coffee rings on the Bohemians page “were inspired by the grimy look of the door and the village itself at the time…this was a community in flux, always changing, and the project itself is sort of incomplete, something being brainstormed over coffee.”

The interactive component of this exhibit is doubtless to resonate with twenty-first century audiences.