There is no one like Glenn Horowitz. He is the loose cannon of the bookselling world.
He is not a member of the most prestigious organization of Antiquarian Booksellers, the ABAA, yet he handles some of the choicest literary material that appears on the market.
Rachel Donadio profiles Horowitz in this Sunday’s NYT Book Review section.
What makes Horowitz so successful?
He is a businessman and a bookseller. It is not a question of whether he loves or appreciates books it is the fact that he can negotiate and seal the deal that makes everyone happy. He understands that these days it is simply not enough for an institution to buy an archive. There are other variables that come in to play that he pays attention too. For example when he sold Norman Mailer’s archive to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas there was a stipulation that the author donate back some monies for the cataloging and preservation of the archive.
Here are some items that were laying around his office during Donadio’s visit:
-a collection of Evelyn Waugh first editions
-some private correspondence of former president Gerald Ford
-Ezra Pounds’s personal copy of Dante’s “Purgatorio”, annotated by Pound
-letter from Leonard Woolf to Vita Sackville-West the day of Virginia Woolf’s suicide!
Here is are a few of the author archives he has had a hand in placing:
-Don DeLillo
-Watergate Notebooks of Woodward and Bernstein
-Vladimir Nabokov
-Bernard Malamud
-Kurt Vonnegut
-Nadine Gordimer
-Joseph Heller
Like most Prince’s this one has a dark side too:
-he was involved in a shady transaction involving Conrad Black, former head of the media company Hollinger. He acquired some personal papers of Franklin Roosevelt for $3.3 million in 1999 and then sold them to Black a few years later for $8 million. Apparently Black, who was writing a biography of Roosevelt, did not pay for the material himself but used the company’s money instead.
-in the early 1980’s he built a tremendous collection of James Joyce material for Dennis Silverman. Silverman was former head of Local 810 of the Teamsters. While under investigation for “having appropriated $3 million in union pension funds” Horowitz sold Silverman’s entire library for an undisclosed sum.
-some of the items from the Silverman collection where then sold by Horowitz to real estate developer Roger Rechler whom he “cultivated and persuaded to collect first editions of 20th century literature”. In 2002 Horowitz arranged to sell the Rechler library through Christie’s and end up buying back many of the books at the auction.
There is no one like Glenn Horowitz.
Picture of Horowitz from David Patrick Columbia’s New York Social Diary