Help identify unknown signatures from the Greenwich Village bookshop door

Yesterday, the Ransom Center launched the web exhibition The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door: A Portal to Bohemia, 1920–1925. The exhibition uses a door from a bookshop owned by Frank Shay in Greenwich Village in the early 1920s as an entryway into the lives, careers, and relationships of New York bohemians of that era. The door is signed on both sides by more than 240 artists, writers, publishers, and other notable 1920s Village habitués, and the web exhibition uses the signatures to reconstruct the intersecting communities that made Greenwich Village famous as an epicenter of Modernism.

Although about 190 of the signatures on the door have been identified, more than 50 signatures are still unknown, and visitors are encouraged to submit information about any signatures they might recognize.

Curator Molly Schwartzburg shares that she received the first confirmed identification yesterday with the launch of the website. The signature was identified as the English publisher Jonathan Cape by The University of Texas at Austin’s own Michael Winship, the Iris Howard Regents Professor of English Literature. Cape’s distinctive signature includes a slash at the end of his last name, which worked as a red herring on the minds of the project’s curators until Dr. Winship made his suggestion. The identification was confirmed swiftly with a trip to the stacks and reviewing an inscription by Cape in a book.

Six more submissions have come in since, most from New York City. Staff will be investigating these leads in the next week, and the web exhibition will be updated accordingly.