The New York Times Book Review
Glenn Horowitz

The New York Times Book Review
The Papers Chase

Glenn Horowitz is a rare book dealer based in New York City who in recent years has come to dominate the rarefied market in literary archives. He has single-handedly driven up the market to levels never expected.

Aside from collecting rare first edition copies of literary and fine art books, Horowitz makes a great deal of his living by selling and brokering the archives (manuscripts, personal papers and correspondence) of some of the most respected literary minds of the last few centuries. His deals range from Norman Mailer's personal papers, to Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate notebooks, to a personal letter Virginia Woolf wrote to a friend on March 28th, 1941, the day she committed suicide.

Horowitz sometimes purchases the books and documents for his own collection, which he can then sell to a personal collector, then sometimes buy it back from them years later only to resell the book again to someone else, while constantly inflating the market. Other times, he helps broker the placement of the archives to establishments such as, The New York Public Library, The Ransom Center, Harvard University or national libraries around the world.

The deals range from thousands to multiple millions of dollars. From an $8 million sale for some of Franklin D. Roosevelt's personal papers to a private collector in 2000, to a first edition copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" for $160,000 in 2002. Whether he's purchasing a book at auction that he knows he can resell for profit, or making years worth of phone calls to an author in hopes of convincing them to sell their archive to a well known establishment, at the end of the day, Horowitz claims, "That's what I do, I trade books."