To the sincere student of art or literature it is America's greatest proving ground...in all this great United States it is the only place a person can sport a stocking with a hole in the heel, and an idea.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

[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.

"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.

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.

Signatures included in the writing category consist of those of poets, historians, translators, critics, fiction and travel writers, playwrights, humorists, journalists, and screenwriters.

Visual artists who signed The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door included architects, sculptors, cartoonists, photographers, industrial designers, illustrators, typographers and more.