https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/28/a-controversial-rare-book-dealer-tries-to-rewrite-his-own-ending Skip to main content The New Yorker * Newsletter Search * The Latest * News * Books & Culture * Fiction & Poetry * Humor & Cartoons * Magazine * Puzzles & Games * Video * Podcasts * Goings On * Festival Open Navigation Menu Find anything you save across the site in your account Close Alert The New Yorker Profiles A Controversial Rare-Book Dealer Tries to Rewrite His Own Ending Glenn Horowitz built a fortune selling the archives of writers such as Vladimir Nabokov and Alice Walker. Then a rock star pressed charges. By Tad Friend October 21, 2024 * * * * * Glenn Horowitz sits at a desk surrounded by boxes and books. Horowitz reshaped a staid business with a combination of acumen and gall. One longtime customer said, "For grifters, Glenn's a scholar, and for scholars, he's a grifter."Photographs by Brian Finke for The New Yorker Save this story Save this story If Glenn Horowitz comes calling, should you be flattered or alarmed? It means that you have an exceptional literary reputation. It also means that your time on earth is nearly up. Horowitz, a rare-book dealer of matchless temerity and flair, has sold the papers and possessions of more Nobel laureates than anyone else; he describes himself, with derisive pride, as "the Grim Reaper with a sack of shekels on his back." He sold the archives of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, and Bob Dylan, as well as books from Derek Walcott's library, manuscripts of Seamus Heaney poems and Saul Bellow stories, spicy letters that he acquired from one of William Faulkner's mistresses, and Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yiddish typewriter. He also sold Alice Walker's papers for $1 million, Vladimir Nabokov's for $1.375 million, Cormac McCarthy's for $2 million, Norman Mailer's for $2.5 million, and John Updike's for $3 million, arranging a deal between Harvard University and Updike's widow a few years after Updike said that allowing him into the house would be like "visiting the undertaker who's going to bury me." Horowitz's knock is the scrape of the chisel on your tombstone. When he was preparing to sell Tony Kushner's archive, Kushner insisted that he not be marketed as the "Angels in America" guy, a one-hit wonder. The dealer replied, "If you hadn't written 'Angels in America,' we wouldn't be having this conversation." Horowitz, who is sixty-nine, plows through as many as two hundred and fifty books a year and can tell a lively story about nearly everything he's read or heard or done. He deals in stupendous things, and his gift is to illuminate their stupendousness, as Las Vegas illuminates the night sky. The novelist Jonathan Lethem, whose archive Horowitz sold to Yale University, told me, "Glenn is able to do with books what artists do with other objects, such as the Golden Bowl or Hitchcock's glass of milk: he makes them glow from within." Every form of collecting is an effort to stop time, but book collecting is a singularly hopeful incarnation of that wish. It is nourished by twin beliefs: first, that our most glorious ideas and fancies have been bound together in crushed morocco or polished calf--sacred repositories that must be conserved against fire and water and forgetfulness. And, second, that ownership of great literature in its most talismanic form will ennoble you. Horowitz cultivates these credos in his clients, yet his usual practice is to wrest books from the grip of one, bestow them into the hands of another, then wrest them back for a third. When I told him that Susan Cheever, the writer and the daughter of John Cheever, said that Horowitz had paid her handsomely for her father's inscribed novels and letters "because Glenn is a gentleman, and because he wanted to help me," he seemed offended. "I like Susan enormously," he assured me, "but I bought from her at prices that allowed me to sell the material profitably." Dealers in precious objects customarily present themselves as concierges: discreet, in the know, delighted to be of service. Horowitz follows this model insofar as his temperament allows. He delivers decorous circumlocutions in an adenoidal purr: "The subject arose" (I raised it); "Blessedly, I was beckoned" (They responded); "Someone who was qualified psychologically and financially to be a custodian of the letters" (A buyer); "Circumstances finally permitting, we arrived at an alliance of kindred spirits" (We closed the deal). Yet, when he is aroused, Sir Walter Raleigh gives way to Nathan Detroit, often in midsentence. Writing to a colleague who had crossed him, he graciously blamed the slight on "the vicissitudes of corporate life," then smoothly code-switched to "suddenly you shit gold nuggets?" Other dealers characterize Horowitz as a pulp-novel antagonist: the dastardly villain. It's not just that he is brazen, or that his success inspires envy and flashes of antisemitism. It's that rare books have always been a handshake business: the dealer Robert Wilson recalled approvingly that W. H. Auden invited him to cart away his books and letters and "send me whatever you think proper." Few who've dealt with Horowitz would be as blithe. Ed Maggs, a prominent English dealer, told me, "Glenn is such a very clever guy, but I never knew that he particularly understood the truth. I would not trust him one inch." To many of his colleagues' delight, Horowitz was indicted by the Manhattan District Attorney in 2022. A decade earlier, he had sold five legal pads scrawled with lyrics by the Eagles' drummer and singer, Don Henley, including thirteen pages of work on "Hotel California." He'd purchased the pads in 2007 for $50,000 and sold them five years later for $65,000, so his profit was trifling. But, when the two collectors who bought the pads later tried to auction off some of the lyrics, Henley became convinced that they'd been filched from him, and ultimately contacted the D.A. Horowitz and the collectors were charged with possessing stolen property, and Horowitz was accused of helping to fabricate the provenance of the pads. The indictment seemed to confirm suspicions in the trade that, as Horowitz put it to me, "Aha! He must have been doing this all along, thieving and pilfering and stealing like an eighteenth-century pirate." He was more dismayed by the reaction of the leading libraries: "Institutions that I had had a profound hand in shaping--the New York Public Library, Yale, the University of Texas at Austin--started treating me as if I was a dog turd." From his holding cell, after his arrest, he finalized the sale of a Jean Genet manuscript to a prominent institution. The deal fell through once the curators discovered where Horowitz had been texting from. On a gray day in February, the defendants went on trial in Manhattan, and the prosecution began by depicting Horowitz as a master of deception. During the midday break, he and a few family members walked to Le Coucou, an elegant French restaurant. Tracey Jackson, Horowitz's wife, is a writer and the screenwriter of such films as "Confessions of a Shopaholic"; for years, they threw lively parties where you might meet Salman Rushdie, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, or Matthew Barney. "In a city like New York, public profiles and transactional relationships are all-important," she told me. "You come to our party, maybe you need a book deal, and there's Sonny Mehta"--the longtime editor-in-chief of Knopf. "We were the white-hot center of that." I met Horowitz twenty years ago at one of his parties, and we became friendly without ever quite becoming friends. My wife and I had an occasional dinner with him and Jackson, or went to gatherings at their Manhattan apartment or their house in Sag Harbor. He'd greet you with a ringmaster's flourish, grasping your arm as he inquired, "How's your health? Have you lost weight? And the kids are well, I trust?" Keenly attuned to his guests' networks and net worths, Horowitz often seemed to be sizing me up to see how much use I might be to him (not much, we tacitly agreed). I went nearly a decade without seeing him before I began work on this story, but he lingered in my mind as a gatekeeper to a glimmering world--the kind of New Yorker who wears Tod's loafers without socks and has a regular table at Michael's. It turns out to be more complicated, of course. At Le Coucou, as Horowitz picked at a plate of heritage chicken, Jackson said, "It's been a time of fear and heartbreak and loneliness. We've lost fifty per cent of our friends--when you can't help people anymore, they disappear. A woman yelled at me in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel, 'How dare you be here?' So we're pariahs, apparently." Horowitz scowled and said, "We are charged with fibbing, not under oath. There's nothing I did that doesn't comport with the way I've done business for forty years, and I'd do the same exact thing again." His mirthless laugh might have suggested Kafkaesque persecution, or Hardyesque inexorability of fate. Either way, he appeared determined to rewrite the ending. Bill Kelly, who retired two years ago as the director of the Research Libraries of the New York Public Library, admires Horowitz's protean talents. "For grifters, Glenn's a scholar, and for scholars, he's a grifter," he said. "But, really, he's an impresario. He brought me some Virginia Woolf correspondence and first editions, knowing well what we might need in our collections, and we wound up acquiring it for about half of what I expected"--$750,000, with an equal amount credited as a charitable gift. "Glenn even suggested two or three admirers of Woolf who could fund the purchase for us. The deal was all tied up in a bow before he came into my office." Kelly went on, "Pretty much all of my colleagues in the book world and the library world regard Glenn as Satan, and the Henley matter just intensified the contempt: I'm never going to do business with Glenn again. Well, who are you going to do business with, then? Who else does business at that level?" Image may contain Frank Finlay Cup Furniture Table Cutlery Fork Adult Person Chair Dining Table Blade and Knife Horowitz's peers describe him as unusually pugnacious. One dealer said, "The space Glenn wants to be in with you is negotiating, challenging you." In England, in the days before the Industrial Revolution ruined everything, there were two professions a gentleman could pursue: wine merchant and rare-book dealer. Neither required undue exertion. That clubbability still overlays the trade in rare books: the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America, or A.B.A.A., is ninety-eight per cent white and eighty-two per cent male, and many of its members' Web sites appear to have been designed by hobbits. Even as book collectors have, over the centuries, shifted shape from rectors to hedge-fund managers, they have remained driven by an impulse that is both febrile and fastidious. Traditional collecting aims at first editions in "pristine" or "mint" condition; the booksellers' wry joke is "Never judge a book by its contents." Valuable books are protected with Mylar jackets or leather slipcases against the depredations of soiling, rubbing, thumbing, cropping, scuffing, chafing, shaking, and shelf wear. A book in the ninety-ninth percentile of condition will often be worth two to three times more than a book in the ninetieth percentile. Christiaan Jonkers, an English dealer, told me, "If you're of a compulsive nature, you can forever pursue closer and closer degrees of perfection, and I will encourage customers in that laudable pursuit." Yet changes are afoot. Book Row, around Manhattan's Fourth Avenue, once contained forty-eight rare- and used-book stores, complete with standoffish cats; now only the Strand remains. The Internet destabilized both supply and demand. Before, collectors had to wait for a mimeographed mail-order catalogue to learn whether a long-sought copy of "Sons and Lovers" had turned up. Prices were based on condition, the fame of the work, and the scarcity of the copy on sale--a scale delineated, in order of increasing expense, by such descriptors as significant, pivotal, seminal, stunning, very rare, exceedingly rare, and extremely rare. The Internet made scarcity scarce: everyone could see that there were a gazillion copies of the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica for sale online, and their price plunged. To sell, a book now had to be the best copy, the cheapest copy, or the only copy. The business, at the top end, angled away from condition and toward singularity, toward "association copies": books owned by or signed by the author or by someone instrumental to their contents. A well-preserved first edition of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" might sell for $1,000. That same copy might go for $10,000 if Hemingway had signed it; $20,000 if he'd inscribed it to someone he knew; $50,000 if he'd inscribed it to Dorothy Parker; or $300,000 if he'd movingly inscribed it to one of his wives. Such books required dealers to know more and to be more imaginative: they had to articulate what made a particular provenance or inscription so valuable. Christiaan Jonkers said, "Our job as booksellers is to justify the difference between the price we bought it at and the price we're selling it at by providing a narrative about why you should buy it." The bookseller's narrative is often one of proximity to inspiration, a tangible point of contact with genius. This idea is implicit in the prizing of first editions--especially first editions with a personal connection to the source. The novelist Reynolds Price said of his treasured copy of "Paradise Lost," which was originally owned by John Milton's daughter, "It was like the apostolic succession. I was touching the hand that touched the hand that touched the Hand." A superb dealer can, Scheherazade-like, embed such narratives within a tale of historical sweep. Henry E. Huntington, a railroad and streetcar magnate whose book collection would form the basis of the Huntington Library, once remarked, "Men may come and men may go, but books go on forever. The ownership of a fine library is the surest and swiftest way to immortality!" The person who'd imbued him with this belief was his dealer, George D. Smith. Glenn Horowitz grew up in the Borscht Belt, two hours' drive from Manhattan and a nearly unreachable distance from the rare-book dealers on Madison Avenue. His family owned a bungalow colony where Jewish families from the city rented cabins for the summer; his father, Aaron, also helped run a used-furniture store. The area, around the town of Wawarsing, "was Podunk," Horowitz told me. "One movie theatre, no restaurants of any quality, no museums." A bright, wary child, he lived in fear of his mother, Lynne, a former elementary-school teacher. "She screamed and threw shoes and food at me and my father," he said. "I still carry a bucket of anger and frustration at her, and some anger at my father, too, for taking her side ninety-eight per cent of the time." Horowitz was rescued by a librarian with the splendid name of Virginia Wolfe Bartlett. "I was blessed that my sophomore year she arrived at my school, a compelling and attractive woman," he said. "She made a project of me, and she soon had me reading five to seven books a week: Austen, Dickens, Hemingway, Pound." That year, Horowitz also began seeing a girl named Poochie. "She was half Black and half Puerto Rican, a single mother at age fifteen. I was in love with her. Anthony, my friend and the father of her child, attempted suicide by drinking a bottle of Clorox after he found out about me and Poochie." Horowitz could have stayed and been a frustrated used-furniture dealer. Instead, determined to prove to his mother that he was "worth more than having food thrown at me," he left and never looked back; he is not in touch with his brother or sister, let alone Anthony or Poochie. At Bennington College, Horowitz wrote fiction under the tutelage of Bernard Malamud and appraised his wealthy, worldly classmates. One of his professors, the novelist Nicholas Delbanco, told me, "Glenn had to recast himself as a savant, in ways that were contrary to who he was as a wide-eyed boy." Yet Horowitz found that art offered him a point of entry. "The first time I read 'Ulysses,' as a freshman," he said, "it made me understand what the act of reading was about. It opened up the idea that I was participating along with Joyce in constructing the text, in trying to unravel all his asides and culs-de-sac that would keep the scholarly industry buzzing." A man shows a group of three mobsters a suitcase full of disorganized money. "It's all there, but my life is such a mess right now I didn't have time to organize it." Cartoon by Jon Adams Copy link to cartoon Link copied Shop After graduating, in 1977, he moved to New York, where he acquired a literary agent, with help from Malamud, and worked on a novel in the magic-realist vein. But he soon realized, "Nobody's going to read this shit." His day job, in the rare-book room of the Strand, seemed more promising: "I loved matching financial wits with the brightest of my customers, and I'd wake up thinking, How can I make an extra dollar today?" Two years after arriving in the city, he opened Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, on the fourth floor of a nondescript building near Grand Central Terminal. "I had beautifully creamy stationery and a bright-red logo stolen from an English designer named Reynolds Stone," he recalled. Broadly speaking, there are two types of dealers and collectors: those delighted by medieval incunabula or King James Bibles, and those drawn to the more transactional arena of "modern firsts"--fiction and poetry since Henry James. The former type is often dismissive of the latter; a dealer named Tom Goldwasser told me that the modern firsts he sells are seen as "books for half-educated people." Horowitz was firmly of the latter type. He had inventory, because a criminal-defense lawyer he'd met at the Strand ran into difficulties and sold him his collection of Steinbecks and Hemingways. (Horowitz told me definitively that the price was $75,000, then later declared that it was $100,000; his numbers can have a magic-realist quality of their own.) A chunk of the payment came from his bar-mitzvah money. He also got a loan from his father, who worked for several years in his office, keeping the books. Horowitz had a plan for his ascent. He told me, "There were elderly people whom it made sense to befriend, to do the errands for them that young people can do." His first conquest was a dealer named Marguerite Cohn, the doyenne of House of Books, on Madison Avenue, who was in her nineties. Cohn was working with a collector named Carter Burden, a Vanderbilt heir whose credo was "You can never be too thin, too rich, or have too many books." Horowitz said, "I was in her shop one day, carrying the galleys of my third catalogue, seductively, and Carter came in. I knew exactly who he was: tall, thin, handsome Dunhill blazer. She recovered well and told him, 'Glenn was bringing me, for you, at my request, the galleys of his new catalogue.' " Burden called that afternoon and ordered a hundred and eighty books, Horowitz said: "When he came by with his driver to pick them up, I told him, 'If you're going to build a great collection, you're going to need Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Eugene O'Neill.' By the time we were done talking, I'd identified eight more genres for him." By honing Burden's taste, Horowitz weaned him from Cohn. (He noted Cohn's death, in 1984, with a so-it-goes shrug: "Margie looked the wrong way leaving the Ritz in London and got hit by a garbage truck. Tom Stoppard had to go to the morgue and identify the body, what was left of it. She was about as big as a leaf of lettuce.") In the next fifteen years, Horowitz sold Burden several thousand books. A dealer named Rick Gekoski told me, "Glenn saw, in a way that few of the rest of us did, that if you want to make serious money you need to spend ninety-five per cent of your time with the five per cent of your clients who will provide ninety-five per cent of your income." Horowitz scoured the lists of dealers from places like Gloucester City, New Jersey, and Oxford, Mississippi. "The book business is hierarchical," he told me. "Books move from rural environments into urban environments, where buyers can conceive of higher prices." Burden could conceive of Horowitz's prices, but he was slow to pay. "Carter almost bankrupted me through his good old English habit of paying his bills once a year," Horowitz said. "At his peak, he owed me about half a million. I'd try to get him to pay, and he couldn't sign a check because he'd sprained his wrist playing squash." He chuckled. "I learned a great deal from him." Horowitz was also working to assemble a home life. In the early eighties, he fell for a cartoonist named M. G. Lord, who was grieving the murder of a woman she'd loved. "The first few years were great," Lord said. "Glenn wrote me, 'I know who you are, and I love you even more because of it.' He had the ability to make you feel really valuable." In 1985, Carter Burden hosted their wedding at the River House. The night before, a Henry James scholar whom Horowitz had befriended handed him a treasure to sell on his behalf: James's annotated copy of a play he'd written based on his novel "The American." In Burden's kitchen, before the ceremony, Horowitz sold him the play for $45,000. And then, in the expansive spirit of the day, he knocked off five grand. If an association copy feels closer to the creative process than a first edition, then an archive--replete with heavily revised drafts and letters about the elusive muse--feels closer still. Yet, when Horowitz started out, celebrated authors often donated their "foul papers" to their alma mater, or simply tossed them. Quicker than anyone else, Horowitz grasped that these heaps of disordered proximity were of such interest to scholars that they'd burnish the renown of the institution that contained them. He also saw that a market maker would have enormous leverage. He would be intermediating between parties who didn't even know the product existed until he supplied it: as he once remarked, his job with an archive was "to broker a marriage between an uninformed seller . . . and a likely but unsuspecting purchaser." He sold his first archive in 1984, after Paula Schwartz, W. S. Merwin's fiancee, mentioned that the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign wanted to buy his papers. She asked Horowitz if he would come to dinner with the curators and help. When he said that he didn't know anything about archives, she replied, "Whatever you know is a thousand times more than Bill knows." At the dinner, Horowitz recalls, "Bill started babbling to the university people, and he would have said, 'Give me ten thousand and I'll send you everything.' It was a revelatory moment, where I understood all the vibrations. To shut Bill up, I said, 'I'll be out in Maui' "--where Merwin lived much of the year--" 'in February to catalogue everything.' " He went with Lord to Hawaii and spent five days working through the files. "We were probably stoned the entire time," he said. "I catalogued the papers, which had some wonderful Sylvia Plath and Galway Kinnell letters, and I told Bill, 'Two hundred and twenty-five thousand is the appropriate price'--a number I a little bit pulled out of the sky." The university, as a state-funded institution, required a second opinion, which came in at $35,000. "I later learned to respond to that 'We need another appraisal' objection by saying, 'I'm not evaluating the collection, I'm prepared to sell it to you for this number,' " Horowitz said. "But back then I called the Illinois folks and said, 'I've been talking with Bill Cagle at the Lilly' "--the library at Indiana University Bloomington--" 'and he said he'd pay a hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars.' They said, 'We can get the deal done for a hundred and eighty-five." Horowitz leaned back blissfully. "I had fifteen per cent of the transaction. I said to myself, 'Do you know how many books I'd have to sell to make twenty-eight thousand dollars?' It Linda Blair-like caused my head to spin on its neck." Mother hands teenager daughter car keys in front of car. "Let's take these tender emotions and volatile mother-daughter dynamics and teach you how to drive!" Cartoon by Maggie Larson Copy link to cartoon Link copied Shop The archives business was poised for disruption. Forty years ago, scholars had to make an appointment, and sometimes even furnish letters of recommendation, before they donned white gloves and began piecing through boxes. With digitization, they could search an author's papers online from anywhere in the world. "The first decade was slow," Horowitz recalled. "But selling the Nabokov archive to the New York Public Library in 1991 got it all going." Though Nabokov's son, Dmitri, was a touchy and domineering client, from the dealer's point of view he was ideal. "Dmitri never achieved that third dimension that befitted someone who bore the name Nabokov," Horowitz explained. "So he ended up taking the brutalist position of 'I'm going to get rid of this material'--applying a patina of elegance through the beautiful catalogue we made--'but I want as much money for it as I can get.' " It was the first seven-figure archive, selling for almost $1.4 million. Rodney Phillips, who handled the sale for the library, told me that it was worth the price: "It greatly increased our visibility and status, and it's still one of the most heavily used collections there." Writers have reasons to resist having their work archived. As Horowitz told me, placing an archive means "moving data out of the darkness into bright sunlight." Gamy secrets can emerge: D. M. Thomas's archive, at the British Library, includes a list of the eighty-eight women he'd slept with, with a grade attached to each encounter. Stylists are often reluctant to reveal their kludgy early drafts, a prospect that Gabriel Garcia Marquez likened to "being caught in your underwear." Horowitz has a response for every misgiving. When Tom Wolfe was having second thoughts, he bucked him up with a speech that I also heard him deliver to a photographer who'd sought his counsel. "Don't leave the archive to your children," he implored. "After you're dead, it will all be even more poignant for them, because the material comes to embody their bygone beloved mother--all that's left of you. It just becomes a sour, brackish, unpleasant experience." I spoke with a number of writers, and widows of writers, who praised Horowitz's work in seeking out, curating, and selling their archives. He would not rest until they agreed to work with him. M. G. Lord said, "Glenn would be crawling around people's houses, looking under the bed, and it was all kind of charming." She termed this practice "the widow watch," and drew a cartoon that showed Horowitz in a cemetery, comforting a bereaved wife by saying, "If you let me sell his archive for you, you'll be able to buy that second home in Sag Harbor." Horowitz venerates the writers he pursues--until his quest fails. Louise Gluck, who wouldn't let him sell her archive, was "a madwoman." Orhan Pamuk, whom he approached with the same idea, is "the most self-centered person imaginable." Horowitz remembers the Merwin transaction as a vital moment in his growth, but Merwin and his wife always believed, without any proof, that Horowitz had cherry-picked his library for his own benefit. A leading appraiser told me that Merwin repeatedly complained that Horowitz had shorted him on the payment for his archive. (Horowitz denied this, and said that he had bought at least fifty of Merwin's books without incident.) Twenty years after the sale, M. G. Lord, who by then had become a writer herself, went to see Merwin read in Los Angeles. "I expected to be greeted warmly, but he wouldn't speak to me," she told me. "Paula took me aside and basically said, 'You have to understand--Glenn stole from him. And we kind of hate you, because you were complicit.' " Horowitz said that when his team catalogues an archive, "I ask myself, 'How heavily biographied will this person be?' I'm looking for correspondence with publishers and agents and editors and other writers, which can open up research in lots of directions. You yearn to find intimate documentation, diaries and journals, that has never been disclosed." Yet archives, in one way or another, are invariably incomplete. Michael Ryan, a retired curator, said, "You're always seeking the complete correspondence, but what you mostly wind up with are incoming letters. You can only get a piece of the man, not the full man." Curators like an archive to "talk" to their other collections: it makes more sense to acquire the correspondence of Maxwell Perkins if you already have the other side of some of it from Hemingway or Fitzgerald. Ultimately, though, what Horowitz is selling is a writer's conversation with the culture at large. When he pitched David Mamet to Tom Staley, a longtime archival director at the University of Texas at Austin, he characterized him as "the last American playwright, somebody whose work, like that of Williams, Miller, and O'Neill, became part of the larger dialogue." Sold, for $1.65 million! Staley was a like-minded ally. He was determined to make his library, the Harry Ransom Center, the leading American repository for literary archives. Horowitz sold him some forty archives and collections, for about $25 million, and routinely used him as a sounding board and a stalking horse. To avoid cultural-repatriation laws, Staley had a trove of literary papers smuggled out of France in a bakery truck; to avoid apartheid-era sanctions, Horowitz had Nadine Gordimer's archive shipped out of South Africa as a cargo of books. Both men loved a marquee name and a lavish deal that could be framed as a bargain. In 2005, when Norman Mailer was shopping his archive for $5 million, Horowitz told Staley that he was prepared to offer it for just $2.5 million. "And that's the price at which I will buy it!" Staley replied. Both men also relished a memorable story. Staley told Tony Kushner that when he visited Arthur Miller's house he asked about a bundle of letters tied with pink ribbon, and Miller said, "Oh, those are from Marilyn," and tossed them into the fireplace. Horowitz scoffed when I mentioned the anecdote, saying, "I drank enough Scotch with Tom late at night that if he'd watched Arthur Miller burn Marilyn Monroe's letters I would have heard of it. Tom was a world-builder, a fabulist." Tracey Jackson said of Staley, who died in 2022, "Tom was in many ways the father Glenn never had." Horowitz faced greater obstacles in constructing an actual family. By the mid-nineties, he and Lord were living apart. He said, "I felt that if an environment was created where M.G. felt loved and secure, this would somehow expunge her need to express her attraction toward women--but it doesn't work that way, unfortunately." They eventually agreed to divorce, and the proceedings became contentious. When Horowitz shipped Lord's dishware to her in Los Angeles, she told me, "my mother's plates, my grandmother's Limoges--it was all sent with no packing material, so everything was in shards. He blamed it on his packer, but I'd seen how the packer carefully packs rare books, so I find it hard to believe it was accidental. Glenn can be very not nice, too." Horowitz said, "I would never intentionally destroy her family heirlooms," adding, "It may be part of the lack of empathy that people accuse me of, but I have no memory of it." Uniquely among major American dealers, Horowitz never became a full member of the A.B.A.A. It's a point of pride for him. One reason he gives is that the association's only real perk is the ability to exhibit at its rare-book fairs. He suggested another reason to the dealer Sunday Steinkirchner when she mentioned that she was applying for membership: "Why would you want to be bound by a code of ethics?" (Horowitz denied making the remark, adding, "Even if I felt that way, why would I say it?") Whatever his rationale, Horowitz was unsuited to the usual forms of collegiality. He can be magisterially slow to pay his peers. One dealer said, "After years of chasing him, I started putting on my invoices, 'Due on X date, or the property must be returned.' I don't do that with anyone else." A former assistant of Horowitz's, Katie Vagnino, described a typical dodge: "If someone called and said, 'I'm waiting for that payment,' Glenn would say, 'Tell them we mailed the check two days ago.' " (Horowitz said that he would settle any overlooked bills if a reminder came in.) The dealer Joshua Mann told me, "The space Glenn wants to be in with you is negotiating, challenging you. The first time he bought from us, we had an atlas inscribed by Truman Capote to Perry Smith, one of the killers in 'In Cold Blood.' We asked seventy-five hundred dollars, and he bludgeoned us down to less than six thousand. Right afterward, he said, 'I would have paid your price, but I wanted to see what I could get.' " Horowitz's favorite approach with other dealers is to ask, "What's the lowest price you could afford to sell it to me at?" When the dealer says, "Well, X, because that's what I paid for it," Horowitz replies, "That's not true--you could afford to sell it for a dollar. You own it, right? It's just sitting on your shelf gathering dust. Taking your losses is often very healthy!" Most booksellers resist that everything-must-go framework because they remain collectors at heart. The dealer Michael DiRuggiero showed me a copy of Philip Pullman's "The Amber Spyglass" that Pullman had inscribed with a detailed account of his creative process. "This is the copy of this book," he said, "and I'm never selling it." Horowitz rejects such views. He likes to say, "You succeed in business by moving product from point A to point B." When writer friends such as Joseph Heller and James Salter inscribed books to Horowitz, those books often ended up for sale. Cavemen playing charades. "Fire! Smouldering fire! Crackling fire! Roaring fire!" Cartoon by Maddie Dai Copy link to cartoon Link copied Shop I spoke with three women who worked for Horowitz. They told me that he taught them to write crisp copy, to treat each book as a unique work of art, to read people, and to stand up for themselves. "Glenn made book recommendations, from 'Housekeeping' to 'Wide Sargasso Sea,' that opened up a world for me," Jess Butterbaugh, who is now a project manager at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, said. They also told me that he would ask if they wanted to borrow his credit card to buy nicer clothes, inquire about who they'd had sex with over the weekend, or, unprompted, give them weight-loss targets. (Horowitz denies this behavior.) In 1994, he interviewed Jessy Randall to be his cataloguer. She told me, "He asked, 'Do you have a boyfriend?' 'Do you like to smoke marijuana?' 'Are you a lesbian?' I finally said, 'You know these questions are illegal, right?'--which I think might have gotten me the job. Glenn's comfort zone was being in an adversarial relationship with everyone." Katie Vagnino told me that once, when Horowitz got mad at her, he e-mailed her a "Bond villain-esque" warning: "You are standing on such a thin sheet of ice you can't even begin to see how far you can fall." Several of Horowitz's younger colleagues told me that he can be generous with his time and his knowledge. Amir Naghib said, "When my wife came down with long Covid and my daughter was sick for more than a month, I heard from Glenn twice a day, asking what he could do to help." But the dealer's acquisitive focus often operated as a Midas touch, turning those around him into golden objects. A collector named Richard Levey told me that he did business with Horowitz for more than fifteen years, beginning in the eighties. Horowitz sent him items from Robert Lowell and his circle, and Levey sent back Joyce, Huxley, Eliot, and Marianne Moore. "Glenn stayed at my house in Detroit, inquired sincerely about everyone's health, and stank up the place with his cigars," Levey said. "We were friends. We even published a small book together. But, other than one check for twenty-five thousand dollars for a 'Ulysses,' I don't remember getting any money from him. Every time I asked to see a statement of what he owed me, he'd just send me another bill for what I owed him. All in all, I think I'm at least a hundred thousand dollars poorer than I should be." (Horowitz maintains that Levey's figures are "just the memory of an older man," and that, if anything, Levey probably owes him money.) Levey, who didn't keep documentation of his side of the bartering, acknowledges that a less absent-minded customer would have demanded clearer accounting. "Had my eyes been a little smaller, things would have turned out differently," he said. "But every time I'd start to question Glenn he'd say, 'Boy, have I got something for you!' " One morning, I met Horowitz at Christie's Fine Art Storage Services, an air-conditioned warehouse near the Red Hook waterfront. Eight boxes sat on a table in an otherwise empty room: a Joyce collection, much of it purchased from Horowitz, whose owner had decided to sell. "This is the best Joyce collection in private hands," Horowitz said. "Admittedly, there is not usually any satisfaction for the collector in getting the books all at once. However," he went on, his eyes gleaming as he opened a box, "this is a unique opportunity for a family in the U.A.E. or for a library in Canada or Japan . . ." He trailed off, nonplussed to find that the books were all wrapped in white Tyvek, a generic department-store display. He phoned and asked his assistant Silas Oliveira to join him. As Oliveira held bundles aloft, Horowitz shook his head and said, "Nah, that's nothing . . . Nothing . . . Of no consequence." He clarified: "The 'Ulysses' we're looking for, the ones printed in Paris by Sylvia Beach, will be two and a half times that size." When Oliveira finally supplied the book he'd most been awaiting, he examined the inscription, angled on the title page in Joyce's bold hand: "To Ezra Pound: In token of gratitude." His face turned a delicate pink. "Despite the surfeit of great books I've been blessed to handle," he said, "there's something electrifying, a powerful gas released into the atmosphere, about getting your hands on this copy." Flipping through the pages, he said, "Pound helped edit 'Ulysses,' as well as 'The Waste Land,' the twin modernist masterpieces, right at this time. Pound knew everything, one of the half-dozen great brains. He knew French and some Chinese and, in his own meshugganah way, economics." He thought that the book, which he'd first bought from Pound's daughter in the late nineties for a six-figure sum, could now be worth $3 million, if he could stimulate a buyer's appetite. Horowitz's erudition, combined with his energy, is a powerful sales tool. He has a nose for people with income to dispose of and no notion of how it should be disposed. "You want someone who is educable," he told me. He sometimes referred to his bookshop in East Hampton as "the butterfly net": it drew in window shoppers, such as Martha Stewart, whom Horowitz would turn into industrious collectors. In the early eighties, Dennis Silverman, the president of a Teamsters Union chapter, came to Horowitz asking about pulp fiction by Mickey Spillane and H. P. Lovecraft. Horowitz elevated his attention to James Joyce. The Teamster was daunted by Joyce's prose, but not by the requisite investment. "That fucking 'Ulysses'!" he said. "I decided I'd just buy the books." Among his prizes was a "Ulysses" inscribed by Joyce to a book scout named Henry Kaeser, which Horowitz sold him for $48,500. But the book didn't stay Silverman's for long. He was subsequently forced from the union for embezzlement, and, as Horowitz told me, "Dennis, alas, died an alcoholic with an ankle bracelet on his foot, needing money." Horowitz bought the Kaeser copy back, along with the rest of his client's collection, and then sold it, for $115,000, to Roger Rechler, a Long Island real-estate developer whom he described to a colleague as the kind of man "who walks on his knuckles." Horowitz was able to keep raising his prices because he surrounded himself with impressionable students, a kind of "Dead Poets Society" of social climbers. Rechler had approached him with a plan to fill the library of his Manhattan town house with leather-bound volumes, in the style of an English manor house. Horowitz told him, "People will laugh when they see it." Instead, he took Rechler to exhibitions, murmured in his ear, and made rare books seem as enthralling as the developer's other hobby, breeding and showing Afghan hounds. During the dot-com crash, Rechler ran into difficulties and auctioned his books (retaining their embossed leather slipcases, so that his library would continue to resemble Blenheim Palace). Horowitz bought a third of the collection back for other clients, including the Kaeser. This time, the price jumped to $460,500, paid by the music promoter Ron Delsener. In Horowitz's view, the book still had not found its resting place. A few years later, he predicted in the Times that the Kaeser would be the first twentieth-century book to sell for more than $1 million. He told me, "Honestly, I can't remember now, but, knowing myself, I would imagine I would have used the statement as a come-hither." After the story ran, the artist Richard Prince, another collector in Horowitz's sphere, called and said that he was hither. He proposed a price of $1 million for the Kaeser, and, as Horowitz recalled, "it took Ron about ten seconds to say yes." His commission was $100,000. When Tracey Jackson met Horowitz, at a book party in Manhattan, in 1997, she viewed him as a promising first draft. "Glenn was a terrible dresser, and he always wanted to be the first person at a dinner party," she said. "I told him, 'No, it's declasse.' But I thought, Oh, my God, look at all this raw clay!" Jackson was at home in realms that Horowitz had yet to penetrate; her mother was the society columnist for the Santa Barbara News-Press and a lover of Baron Philippe de Rothschild. After they married, in 1999, Horowitz took to wearing bespoke suits, and they began hosting book parties at their rented town house on the Upper East Side. A conveyor belt of poached salmon and orchids from L'Olivier ran through their lives. Horowitz said, "The parties gathered in people who realized they could sell materials. It made significant collections available to me." A chance meeting with a Paris Review editor led to Horowitz representing the magazine's archives; George Plimpton, its editor-in-chief, later recommended him to Carl Bernstein, and in 2003 Horowitz sold the Watergate papers of Bernstein and Bob Woodward to Tom Staley for $5 million. "That was far, far, far in excess of what a seasoned appraiser would have assessed the collection at," he said. "But we laced Woodward and Bernstein into the deal"--they hosted a series of Watergate conferences at the university--"and Texas got so much publicity that it was totally worth it to them." In the nineties, Horowitz expanded his business to fine art and photography, before eventually setting them aside. By the turn of the century, he was at the apex of both the rare-book trade and the archive business. One archives dealer told me, "Glenn made the fucking market. He was like Larry Gagosian"--the leading dealer in contemporary art--"and there was no No. 2. The others just weren't good at sales. One more tumble of the dice and they'd have been librarians." Horowitz's operation embodied both the allure and the poignance of the trade. In 1998, when a philosophy student and book dealer named John McWhinnie was considering Horowitz's offer to manage his East Hampton store, he asked colleagues for advice. A dealer named John Wronoski recalled, "I said, 'John, you'll have the opportunity to see and do things that no other bookseller could give you access to. At the same time, you risk losing your soul.' " But, Wronoski went on, "John loved books, and Glenn represented the opportunity to get closer to the grail: intimacy with the sources of creation, with your gods, through the intercession of objects." "Why am I always having my picture taken from an unflattering angle" "Why am I always having my picture taken from an unflattering angle?" Cartoon by P. C. Vey Copy link to cartoon Link copied Shop Horowitz's remit became global. He had tea with Naguib Mahfouz's widow in Cairo; he bought rare books in Jaipur; he visited Derek Walcott in St. Lucia, to "go ferreting around for Walcott material," he recalled. On a trip to nearby Grenada, he met his match in determination. He discovered that "the library there had one of the two very rare books that were printed when Derek was a teen-ager. What I liked was that it had the stamps of the Grenada public library in it--it was particularized in a way that would permit you to ask a sophisticated collector to pay a premium. I said to the librarian, 'Seems like that book is a bit lost down here. What if I offered to buy it'--I would have proposed ten thousand or so--'and I also sent you a hundred and fifty boxes of books to replenish your library?' She exploded like a volcano: 'You should be deported from the island! Never darken my door again!' " Horowitz's brass shone brightest in his dealings with Lord Conrad Black, the C.E.O. of Hollinger, the Canadian media conglomerate. In 2000, Horowitz bought a collection of Franklin Roosevelt material for $3.3 million, then sold it to Black for $8 million. Black, no slouch at imperious behavior, persuaded Hollinger's board to make the purchase for him. When the board asked for an appraisal, Horowitz wrote a letter declaring that "nothing of this magnitude and quality has ever appeared in the market," and placed the value at $12 to $14 million. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Hollinger's affairs proved to be a total mess: Black was later convicted of fraud and obstruction of justice and spent more than three years in a federal penitentiary. When I spoke with Black, he expressed a sneaking regard for Horowitz's vigor but remained nettled that "Glenn, speaking to the special committee investigating the company, rather patted himself on the head for making a brilliant sale and taking me over a barrel. It was ungentlemanly." (The committee's report noted that Horowitz recalled calculating his appraisal "on the back of an envelope.") Horowitz seemed to feel that, in these matches of financial wits, Marquess of Queensberry Rules didn't apply. He observed that Black, who was on the board of Sotheby's, "was hardly a member of the extended family of the Beverly Hillbillies," and concluded, with a smirk, "Alas for poor Conrad, the shit hit the fan." As the company fell apart, Hollinger consigned the collection to Christie's. The highest offer was $2.4 million. Horowitz's disinclination to pay his bills has inspired complaints over the years, some on legal stationery. His longtime lawyer, John Morris, told me, "I firmly believe that Glenn always intends to pay, but across twenty-five years this issue has come to my desk six or eight times." Only once, Morris said, did the matter go to court: in 2010, Horowitz settled with Roger Rechler's estate for $130,000. But in Don Henley the dealer was facing an opponent of unprecedented means and resolve. The Eagles, who sold more than a hundred and fifty million albums, rode a tide of surly melancholy and bell-bottom jeans much further than anyone expected, and Henley viewed himself not merely as a celebrity with lawyers on call but as a troubadour in the heroic tradition. Like many writers, Henley had a complex relationship with his rough drafts. When he testified at Horowitz's trial, gravel-voiced in a churchgoing suit, he called his lyric pads "detritus." Yet he had preserved every one in his barn in Malibu, and in 1980 he shipped a handful of them to the Eagles' biographer, Ed Sanders. "I thought if I gave him access to our songwriting process," Henley testified, "it would make the book better." Then he forgot all about it for more than thirty years. In the interim, Horowitz tried to sell the archive amassed by Sanders, a member of the influential band the Fugs and a chronicler of the Manson family. When the sale failed, he bought some of Henley's notepads as a consolation. After his associate John McWhinnie died in a snorkeling accident, in 2012, Horowitz cleaned out inventory, and sold the notepads to two rock-memorabilia specialists. It was when they tried to auction off four pages of lyrics to "Hotel California" that Henley was reminded of their existence. He was incensed, mistakenly believing that the notepads had been burgled from his barn. Horowitz agreed to mediate. He knew all the parties involved; Henley had been a customer, and Horowitz hoped that by interceding he could "perhaps revivify Don as a consumer of William Faulkner." He agreed with Henley's lawyer on a price--$8,500--but never mentioned that the collectors retained more than eighty additional pages of lyrics. When they later tried to put some of those pages on the market, Henley, fed up with buying back his own handiwork, had his lawyer complain to the District Attorney. In court, a central issue was the question of title. Did Ed Sanders have a right to the lyric pads, because Henley had never asked for them back? Or did his contract with the Eagles require him to return them? Some dealers felt that Horowitz should have made a thorough inquiry, but most believed that he'd adhered to the good-enough-to-be-defensible industry standard. One dealer told me, "If Glenn was guilty because he was telling stories about provenance, half the booksellers I know should be in jail." When Horowitz was interviewed by prosecutors, in 2017, he was so unconcerned that he didn't bother to call his lawyer. John Morris told me, "Glenn is always going to believe that if a dispute arises his eloquence will get him out of it." In court, though, it emerged that the dealer had written Sanders a number of dubious-looking e-mails: he seemed to be coaching him to tell the D.A.'s office that he'd been given the pads by Henley's writing partner, Glenn Frey. Horowitz wrote, "If Frey, he, alas, is dead, and identifying him as the source would make this go away." The prosecutors had evidence that Horowitz had a history of using the dead for his convenience. In 2009, Horowitz sold the Ransom Center a Thomas Pynchon trove: material gathered by his editor Ray Roberts, who was dying of pulmonary fibrosis. Roberts seemed conscious that Pynchon, who is legendarily private, would be irate to have his manuscripts and letters rerouted. He e-mailed Horowitz to inquire, "Does Texas really have an interest in Pynchon or would it be a keg of dynamite?" Horowitz moved ahead, but with precautions. Once the sale was finalized, he wrote to a Ransom Center publicist, "Let Roberts die before announcing it," because getting into a dispute with Pynchon "would hasten his demise." A few months later, he explained in another e-mail, "My calculation was that it would be hard for TP and his folks to refute the statements of a dead man." (Horowitz told me that the dead man in question was the Little, Brown president Kevin Dolan, who, he says, had given Roberts permission to take Pynchon material--but his e-mail talks specifically of deferring "until after Ray died.") After Pynchon's lawyer got involved, Horowitz finally told the Ransom Center to give the papers back. "I awakened and suddenly realized you can't speak for the dead," he told me. But two manuscripts are still missing, and the Pynchon family remains upset that the Ransom didn't contact them as soon as Horowitz suggested obscuring the sale. They're not too happy with Horowitz, either--even though he insists that all the Pynchon material he catalogued was returned. Pynchon, his wife, and his lawyer were all on the prosecution's witness list. Before they could speak, though, Don Henley blew up the case. Eight days into the trial, he reversed course and waived attorney-client privilege, allowing thirty-five hundred pages of his and his lawyers' e-mails to be delivered to the court. Details in them contradicted key pieces of testimony--they showed, for instance, that Henley knew Sanders's manuscript included photos of the handwritten lyrics--and on March 6th the prosecution dismissed its own case. Judge Curtis Farber scolded the prosecutors for "passive complicity" in a manipulative action by Henley to recover the notepads, and discharged the defendants. As Horowitz's daughter, Lucy, wiped away tears, the dealer shook hands with one of the prosecutors and said, "Thank you for doing your duty." His shoulders beginning to lift, he told me, "I've learned a lot of life lessons, whether or not I apply them, and I'm ready for the rehabilitation." He'd paid more than $1 million in legal fees and lost millions in forgone business. What lessons? I asked. "First and foremost is, Don't talk to law enforcement without a lawyer present!" His wife leaned in and said, "And don't e-mail anything, ever!" The family went out for a celebratory brunch, but Horowitz peeled off, saying, "I'm going to the office to go to work. I want to get my name back." Horowitz has reinvented himself before. In 2016, he became a sort of pop-culture plenipotentiary after he sold Bob Dylan's archive. Horowitz, retained to broker the deal, immediately thought of the George Kaiser Family Foundation, in Tulsa. Five years earlier, he'd helped place Woody Guthrie's archive at the foundation, which was determined to put Tulsa on the cultural map. He told me, "I called my friend Ken Levit, the head of the foundation, and said, 'How are things going with the Guthrie?' And he said, 'Only seventeen to twenty thousand people a year are coming through.' I said, 'The deal I'm working on would guarantee a quarter of a million visitors.' " Horowitz said that his original ask was $30 million, and that he gradually came down to twenty: "I said to Ken, 'Twenty million dollars will buy you a lousy Willem de Kooning painting--and for the same price you get all of Bob Dylan, American icon!' " (Two people who are intimately familiar with the sale say that, in fact, there was no haggling over major points; Horowitz simply proposed a price agreeable to both parties.) Once that deal was signed, Horowitz began working to convince the foundation to buy Johnny Cash's archive: "My idea was that Tulsa should become the archival center of American music." He also began discussing projects with Paul Simon, Neil Young, and Jann Wenner, a co-founder of Rolling Stone. Bill Kelly, who was then at the New York Public Library, told me, "Glenn brought Jann into my office. He'd worked out this deal where we would buy Wenner's papers, all the notes to his interviews with celebrities over the years, and Wenner would coordinate programming around our twentieth-century journalism collection. Glenn said, 'Jann will do a series of evenings and bring in all his fancy friends, and it will bring a ton of attention to the N.Y.P.L.' " As the discussions continued, Horowitz invited Kelly to have lunch with him and Dylan's business manager at Gramercy Tavern. "I try to see five steps ahead with Glenn, but he was ten steps down the road," Kelly said. "He can perform spontaneity beautifully. The lunch was his way of saying, 'Here's a little taste of the world you should be moving into. You can sit there with the dusty archives of the second- or third-tier novelists he was talking about then, or join me on the flashy road to a new entertainment strategy!' " Horowitz planned to ask for $6 to $8 million. However, amid the discussions, Wenner sold a majority stake in Wenner Media. Kelly said, "I kept trying to understand what Wenner's papers actually were, and it turned out that the people who now owned Rolling Stone owned the papers, so what Glenn was actually selling was nothing. It was bupkes. When I challenged Glenn on it, he just laughed and said, 'I'm not selling the archive, I'm selling Jann Wenner.' " (The dealer said it was likely that he told Kelly, "You're also buying into the Zeitgeist through Jann.") The Kaiser Foundation eventually passed on the Johnny Cash collection. Horowitz's vision for the city hasn't turned out quite as promised: last year, fewer than twenty-five thousand people visited the Bob Dylan Center. "I don't think the Kaiser regrets doing the deal," Horowitz said. "But, hey, they caught the milk truck. It's still Tulsa, Oklahoma." After Horowitz's case was dismissed, he returned to his office, on the sixth floor of a nondescript building in midtown. His earlier locations reflected the arc of his ambitions: the outpost near Grand Central, the town house on the Upper East Side, the loft space downtown, and then the thirty-five-hundred-square-foot penthouse overlooking the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art. This room, downstairs from that penthouse, was essentially a storage space with three desks. It was crammed with the leavings of a lifetime: first editions by Salter, Roth, DeLillo, and Heller jammed in with Artichoke Underground lithographs and a five-volume history of the Methodist Church. He e-mailed several leading libraries to inquire about resuming trade. Leslie Morris, at Harvard's Houghton Library, hesitated to reply. She'd been a fan of Horowitz's. "He peppers you with e-mails, seven to ten a week, to the point where I stop opening them," Morris told me. "But I appreciate the hard sell." Still, his behavior in the Henley matter left her and others with serious questions. "It may not have been illegal," she said, "but eliding the provenance of something could certainly be considered unethical." Stephen Enniss, who succeeded Tom Staley at the Ransom Center, declined to discuss Horowitz, observing, "Glenn's contribution to the trade has been to introduce a Trump-like, transactional ethic into what had been a guild-like community." Horowitz began to realize that, though his case had been dismissed, he was still on trial. He told me, "The five institutions that constituted fifty to sixty per cent of my income evidently came away feeling 'Blowhard, egomaniac, lives in New York, makes lots of money off of us--but the material is so good we have to deal with him.' And maybe they don't feel that way anymore. It's that great line from 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,' 'Sentence first--verdict afterwards.' " The Henley case was flimsy, but the attendant celebrity-driven publicity had encouraged Horowitz's peers to recirculate old stories and grudges. As I looked into them, I discovered embellishments in the dealer's recountings of small matters and elisions in his recollections of larger ones. When I began to bring these issues to his attention, he grew cordially elusive. "Let me have until tomorrow," he said at one point, "and I will get back to you by the end of the weekend." He would offer up character witnesses and then, after reconnoitering or reconsidering, take me aside in the manner of a physician consulting with a colleague to murmur, "He's operating under, as you can imagine, great strain," or "She's an ancient woman who, as it seems, has a brain illness." John Morris, Horowitz's lawyer, told me, "I wish that Glenn would focus on each person in front of him, rather than the next transaction beyond them. Have we discussed business practices? Yes: 'Make your intent clear--"What am I selling you, on what terms?"--and then abide by it.' I'm not sure how much sinks in." Horowitz acknowledged that he could be "pigheaded" and "sharp-elbowed," but seemed to view most of these issues as procedural quibbles raised by jealous colleagues. "I don't have time to dip my toe in inch-high puddles," he e-mailed me. "It feels somewhat as if you're endeavoring to indict me for conducting business with more energy and imagination than others." There is certainly an argument that other dealers see themselves as hedgehogs outraged by a fox, when they're actually foxes outraged by a wolf. The dealer Tom Goldwasser suggested, "Based on the public record, Glenn is seventy per cent honest, and maybe the average bookseller is eighty per cent honest." Yet some of Horowitz's conduct seemed to me beyond any conceivable industry practice. In the eighties, he worked with a collector named Walter Shirley, who was rapidly drinking himself to death. He describes Shirley as "a ne'er-do-well playboy out of a Preston Sturges movie--white loafers, a boater, an ascot--who was selling his books because he needed money." On two occasions, when other dealers were looking at material in Shirley's apartment, Horowitz invited them to take whatever they wanted, as Shirley would never notice. One of the dealers told me, "That to me was egregious. I thought that Glenn wanted something to hold over us, that he wanted to make us complicit." Horowitz told me that any such invitation must have been a joke. A Controversial RareBook Dealer Tries to Rewrite His Own Ending Cartoon by Joe Dator Copy link to cartoon Link copied Shop In the summer of 2006, Horowitz and his assistant Jess Butterbaugh went to Gerald Ford's house in Rancho Mirage, California, to assess his archive, and Horowitz shipped the material back to his office for cataloguing. He told me that, after Ford died, that December, the F.B.I. called and "gently suggested it would be wise to return" the trove, to be archived in the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum--which he did. Yet Butterbaugh, who worked for Horowitz for more than six years, said that after the visit to Rancho Mirage he gave her a folder and said, "Keep these where no one can find them." The folder contained letters to Ford, roughly half of them from Richard Nixon. Uncomfortable holding the cache, she returned it to Horowitz a month or two later. She recalls that, when Horowitz packed up the material to return it, she asked whether to include the folder, and he said, "No, we're keeping that." When I asked Horowitz about the archive, he said that he'd brought back a number of inscribed books, but no letters. He added, categorically, "I did not buy any letters or material from President Ford." Around the time of Ford's death, though, he told both a Times reporter and the historian Douglas Brinkley that he'd purchased the archive from the former President. Brinkley, who was working on a biography of Ford, told me that he spent ninety minutes in Horowitz's office reading the Nixon letters. He quoted them throughout his book, and thanked Horowitz profusely in his acknowledgments. Wanting to give Horowitz the opportunity to refresh his memory, I relayed what Butterbaugh had told me. He calmly professed to be mystified, and then recalled that Ford had presented him with one Nixon letter and one from Ronald Reagan, as gifts. (Later, he would add, "There must have been a number of letters that were inserted in the books and that fell out when we examined them.") I told him about Brinkley's reliance on the letters, and e-mailed him a copy of the acknowledgments page. He replied that Brinkley's whole account was made up. "There's not a germ of reality here," he insisted, repeating that he never bought "a single book or letter from President Ford." On that, anyway, we could agree. Still hoping for some sign of regret, or even of ambivalence, I read Horowitz observations from three established dealers that conveyed their distrust of his probity and dislike of his treatment of them. He frowned and scratched his head, then recommitted to his story: "You could flip those quotes around and say, 'He's clearly good at what he does, at certain tactics--better than those three dealers.' And I promise you they would all buy from me tomorrow." They probably would, at that. Kevin Rita, an antiquarian book dealer, told me, "Even with all the problems and suspicions, in a perverse way you want to believe in Glenn. You want him to be aware of his better angels." Early in his career, Horowitz spent a few days with Saul Bellow. "It was like being in the company of a deity," he told me. "Like being a character in 'Herzog.' " Tracey Jackson said, "Glenn likes this work because he wanted to be a great writer, and he's not a great writer. But he understands great art, and how to talk to writers, and he discovered a way that he could sit with Garcia Marquez, and work with these great texts." Yet the texts that the market wants are changing. One day this spring, Horowitz eyed a pile of untidy boxes near his desk--Jeffrey Eugenides's archive--and said mournfully, "Ten years ago, an archive generated by a late-middle-aged heterosexual white male with a certain reputation would have had a percussive quality that is today not the case." He sighed, remembering how he sold John Updike's papers to Harvard for $3 million in 2009. "I'd like to believe that I have enough intellectual and bull-in-the-china-shop vitality to make Harvard buy that archive today. They would, of course, buy it for five hundred thousand, or even a million, but it would be a much more difficult conversation at one and a half million." Horowitz was trying to restore his reputation in a rapidly evolving landscape. Institutions were running short of space: Yale's Beinecke Library, already stocked with more inventory than it can catalogue, recently limited its curators to eight hundred linear feet of new material a year, two-thirds of its usual intake. And, after the murder of George Floyd and the resulting prominence of the Black Lives Matter movement, institutions and individuals alike had accelerated the shift in their appetites. Since Horowitz's trial, Harvard's Leslie Morris has made five small purchases from him, only one of which involved a white male author. "The material being collected is different now," Susan Benne, the executive director of the A.B.A.A., told me. "It used to be about 'high spots'--the pivotal works in literature, science, medicine, and philosophy, what's called 'the mind of man.' Now it's also about topics such as women's history, the Underground Railroad, L.G.B.T.Q.+, and sexual history." Whatever libraries now want Horowitz will provide, even if he has to convince them that it's what they now want. In May, Horowitz had a Zoom call with two officials at Brown's John Hay Library. He hoped to sell them a death-row correspondence between Damien Echols, one of the West Memphis Three--teen-agers wrongly convicted of satanic murders--and Lorri Davis, who championed Echols's cause, fell in love with him, and married him. Echols was released in 2011, after HBO documentaries about the case attracted attention from such supporters as Johnny Depp and Eddie Vedder. The letters--candid, yearning, at times despairing--were potentially the couple's most valuable asset, and Horowitz had priced them at $200,000. Several universities turned down the trove. But, Googling for a likely repository, he discovered that the Hay had a new collection focus: Voices of Mass Incarceration in the United States. As Horowitz's cataloguer helped him locate the Zoom link on his computer screen, he began plotting his pitch. "Brown's project is embedded in the African American experience, and the curator is Black," he said. Echols and Davis were inconveniently white, he acknowledged. "But I can provide Damien to them as part of this. I can also provide them Al Sharpton, who's a very dear friend." He reconsidered. "Actually, he's not a very dear friend. But he's a very dear acquaintance!" When the call began, Horowitz said, "This is very exciting, because this is my fourth Zoom meeting--" "Of this morning, already?" Amanda Strauss, the library's director at the time, asked. "No, no, no--ever!" He went on to praise the library's incarceration project, adding, proudly, "It's curious, because I was incarcerated." After an extended account of his indictment and trial, he elaborated on his bona fides: "When Damien was released, Johnny Depp gave him as a gift, not inappropriately, a first edition of Rimbaud's 'A Season in Hell.' When Damien and Lorri asked Johnny for his permission to sell the book, I had just done a deal with Johnny to sell him Hunter Thompson's archive, so he said, 'You should go see Glenn Horowitz, who's as reasonable and straightforward a character as could be.' " He had begun to anatomize the couple's extraordinary love story when Strauss broke in: "The love story is incredible, and you're the first bookseller to bring us something like this, but our interest is in that story situated within the broader carceral system." Christopher West, who until recently was the library's curator of the Black diaspora, said, "Mr. Horowitz, let me give you an example. Mumia"--Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is serving a life sentence for murder, and whose papers are the project's foundational exhibit--"types on the back of a triplicate form requesting to speak to a correctional officer, uses the material of the carceral system for his own correspondence. I know that sort of material is there--" "I'm sure Lorri has a great deal of it," Horowitz said, "but I didn't ask, because I thought, My God, four thousand letters, written from some hideous, awful place in Arkansas on death row! It almost moved me to tears to see that in certain years there were more letters than there were days in the year. What would be going through a human being sitting behind bars in what had to be a shithole, writing two, three letters a day!" Reading their neutral nods, he cleared his throat and said, "I will certainly pursue the avenues you are kindly shining a flashlight on. And, one helium balloon--I have an intimate and long-standing friendship with Al Sharpton, who would be a great bird dog for material like this. If I ever said, 'Would you go up to Brown and talk?,' he'd be on a train in five minutes." "That's great, Glenn," Strauss said. "It sounds like you have a lot of incredible connections and roots in this." "And I'm not only the first bookseller to bring you something like this, I'm the first incarcerated bookseller to bring you something like this!" Afterward, Horowitz told me that he'd already cut the price to $150,000. "If I make another accommodation, it becomes impossible for them not to do it," he added. "They were trying to see what else they could get, but that was just another way of saying yes. It's done. It's done." It wasn't done, in fact--it still isn't done; it may never be done--but he was already planning to use the sale to launch a new line in innocence-project material. "I am going to ask Sharpton, who's very close to the Central Park Five, to introduce me to a couple of them, and I'll query them as to what is potentially preserved in their files. If this goes well, and a second archive sale follows, there will be a trail of other booksellers that try and follow me." Published in the print edition of the October 28, 2024, issue, with the headline "Pivotal, Seminal, Rare." 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