From 1920 to 1924, Frank Shay had a bookshop at 4 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. Friends and customers autographed the office door, which survived and found its way to the collection of The Ransom Center. Of the 242 signatures, most were unidentified until recently:
Massive databases of searchable books, newspapers and magazines from the 1920s that are now available online have made it possible to identify dozens of the more obscure names on the door in a matter of minutes or hours. The internet's flexible structure allows us to more easily reconstruct the community and its complex web of associations. The flowering of virtual social networking in recent years inspired us to see how it was now possible to reconstruct a community that was firmly grounded in the physical space of 4 Christopher Street ...
The rich resources of the web are, of course, a bittersweet development for those of us who have long loved browsing, talking, and learning from each other in bookstores. While resources on the internet have fostered this project, they have also led directly to the closure of thousands of bookstores over the last decade.Funny to think that an actual door ended up being a door through time.
