Get the latest tech news
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.
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). 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. 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.
Or read this on Hacker News