A Controversial Rare-Book Dealer Tries to Rewrite His Own Ending
October 23, 2024 at 03:01AMIn this engrossing New Yorker profile, Tad Friend profiles Glenn Horowitz, a top dealer of rare books and manuscripts who built a fortune selling the archives of famous writers and celebrities such as Vladimir Nabokov, Alice Walker, and Bob Dylan. Then he was sued by Don Henley, the Eagles’ drummer and singer.
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.
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?”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/10/22/a-controversial-rare-book-dealer-tries-to-rewrite-his-own-ending/
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