Perform a cursory inventory of your associations with 1920s Greenwich Village and you will most likely discover a sea of hazy bohemian images—writers, artists, sooty garrets, Chianti bottles serving as candlesticks—tinged with a degree of unearned sentimentality and without a clear historical referent. What the artists produced or the writers said then seems immaterial now, subsumed by a set-piece vision of creative community sold to you in “Think Different” ads (among countless others).

The Harry Ransom Center’s exhibition The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door does little to disabuse viewers of such associations. Collecting the publications, photos and ephemera of a cadre of writers, publishers, artists and assorted others who signed the blue door in Frank Shay's bookshop in a gesture halfway between yearbook messages and bathroom graffiti, the exhibition articulates the social connections between these bohemians. But the display of these books and personal effects lacks the rasp of unexpected detail that connects the archived materials in a visceral rather than scholarly capacity. Mostly it seems that the exhibition ticks off expected images in a way akin to a checklist.

         

Painted blue around its louvered edges, Frank Shay’s pine door from 4 Christopher Street frames the columns of pencil signatures that appear on its interior panels. Like many of the Harry Ransom Center’s carefully maintained objects, the door itself has an inherent crackle of excitement. Somehow the degree of care taken with the archival materials—and you’ll know well exactly how careful they are if you’ve ever sat in the reading room yourself, filling out duplication forms and enduring snake eyes from formidable librarians—imparts a staticky glow of importance to the materials, as if they were celebrities. This is especially true if you are permitted to handle the Center’s materials yourself; the mandatory instructional videos seem to counsel you in holding an infant rather than handling a book. Certainly the exhibition does not allow viewers to handle the ephemera it contains, presenting its audience with an attenuated version of the thrill of the archive. But even presented behind glass as the bookshop door is, plenty of that electricity remains.

Sadly (most of all for myself, I suppose), I recognized few of the signatures. The first one I noticed was that of Don Marquis—the writer of Archy and Mehitabel, which chronicles the friendship of a Lower East Side cat and cockroach—whose book was a childhood favorite of mine. The other names were unfamiliar, a reminder that in literary circles, great infamy and social wealth during one’s lifetime mean nil in the long run.

The exhibition’s sidebar elements radiate outward through the social connections implied by the bookshop door’s collected signatures. Beginning with bookshop owner Frank Shay, the exhibition guides viewers through the social milieu of Shay’s shop. Much space appears devoted to presenting first-edition copies of the works by the writers who patronized the shop, a setup that should be especially interesting to book designers. But if these display cases seem a bit hollow, it’s because the objects they contain were made explicitly for mass public consumption. The reaction they garner is like that of any commercial object viewed outside of its historical period in that they are interesting in a broader cultural sense but are less applicable to an exhibition which grounds itself in an incidental, occasional and informal expression of community rather than a fixed one.

For this reason, the reproduced copies of two newspapers, The Greenwich Villager and the Quill, are more interesting and more aligned with the exhibition. While they contain editorials, book reviews and other standard newspaper elements, they also run lively gossip columns studded with inside jokes nevertheless charming for all their nicknames and eyebrows-raised asides. The degree of privacy is intermediate as the papers were distributed beyond the coterie of artists they address, resulting in a strangely intimate yet public artifact, almost like a family's annual Christmas newsletter scaled up to include ads for fern bars and typewriter repair.

This sense of public intimacy reverberates through the rest of the displays: it is not the book jacket for Winesburg, Ohio that snags the eye but rather the tossed-off sketches of Hendrick Willem Van Loon (incidentally, Van Loon was the first to sign the door, leaving a small figure of a ship next to his name). As a display of scholarship The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door is impeccable, but its methods often seem at odds with the mores of the community it portrays, thus leaving the heavy-handed bohemian tropes for the most part undisturbed. The thrill of examining talented people’s mundane objects comes from seeing a life of the mind made tangible, and the intrigue of investigating artistic communities comes from finding evidence of prodigious intelligences cross-pollinating. This exhibition seems intent on providing the aura of bohemianism, but due to the limited availability of objects demonstrating this collaborative verve, the exercise has a drier historical tone.

The trouble with archival objects displayed in a gallery setting is that they only possess the power we have already invested in them. Someone who already has a detailed history with a book, who remembers spending hours with it and watching its meaning leaven through time, will feel some thrill to see that author's penciled signature on a door. Seeing such tangible and ephemeral proof reifies the otherwise slippery moments of congress we have with imagined things, and the importance of attending to such connections is precisely what makes the Ransom Center a mansion of the mind. Organizing such experiences in a reliably meaningful way is difficult, however, since seeing such objects presented to an audience under glass is quite different from finding something after a search through an archive. In this exhibition, academic rigor takes the place of the pure, silly wonder of beholding an artifact that has taken root in your own interior world.