The Ways of our Window Displays

Our window displays have always prompted confusion and perplexed the passerby, especially before we put a sandwich board out front, proclaiming our purpose… The Regional Assembly of Text… cards, stationery, journals, souvenirs, button making, letter writing & many other clever things. Before this descriptive signage appeared, people would often pop their head in the door to ask, ‘what kind of a store are you anyway?’ But instead of putting products in our window, which we stubbornly refuse to do, we made a sandwich board for those dumbfounded people. This allows us to treat our window displays as temporary art installations which almost always involve paper & typewriters. In most instances the paper is recycled scraps from other projects and over the years we’ve concocted many different ways to connect paper to itself, by… folding, gluing, stapling, paper clipping, sewing, taping & weaving it together. We also find great delight in foraging thrift stores for paper that already comes on a roll, preferably narrow enough to emerge from the typewriters with satisfying simplicity. Our typewriters are almost always featured in these displays, luring people into our shop, only to be disappointed by the fact that we don’t sell them. But it starts a conversation, usually about the length of their dissertation and how sore their fingers got, or a sigh as they remember the smell of their grandparents basement where a dusty typewriter sat at an abandoned desk. We nod and listen and hope the nostalgia stuns them long enough to look around our unusual store.