Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, Inc.

Los Angeles Times, April 15, 2012

The Tea Fire was raging across the hills of Montecito, and T.C. Boyle was worried. He was worried about the safety of his home, as anyone near the flames would be, and that concern was amplified by the fact that the nearly century-old house was designed by no less than Frank Lloyd Wright. And then there were the papers: the highly combustible manuscripts, research, notes and bound volumes that constitute Boyle's life's work. Everything that had gone into writing two dozen books and 150 stories was stashed in Boyle's basement. If the wind shifted, it would all be lost.

The New Yorker, April 9, 2012

My first short story for this magazine, back in 1993, was a piece called “Filthy with Things.” It concerns a couple so caught up in the mania of collecting and acquiring that they find their living space reduced to the odd trail wending its way through the mountains of precious stuff wedged inside their house. Finally, in desperation, they hire a professional organizer by the name of Susan Certaine, who solves the problem by hauling away everything but the standing walls and the clothes on their backs. To this day, people come up to me, their eyes shifting furtively and hands compressed in adjuration, to confess how deeply the story gnaws at them—this is true horror, and it needs no vampires or zombies to bring home its queasy truths.

The New York Times, December 27, 2011

TULSA, Okla. — Oklahoma has always had a troubled relationship with her native son Woody Guthrie. The communist sympathies of America’s balladeer infuriated local detractors. In 1999 a wealthy donor’s objections forced the Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City to cancel a planned exhibition on Guthrie organized by the Smithsonian Institution. It wasn’t until 2006, nearly four decades after his death, that the Oklahoma Hall of Fame got around to adding him to its ranks.

American Theatre Magazine, December 2011

It could be the scenariou for a Eugene O'Neill play, and in a sense it is -- but one that O'Neill never wrote.

Scene: Screenwriter Philip Yordan's 50-foot-long library, where bookcases, filing cabinets and boxes spill remnants of his life. His widow, Faith Yordan, plows through the morass. She takes an aged envelope from a file drawer and removes a sheaf of brittle pages. Excited, she makes a phone call.

Faith: Paul, I've found a script called Exorcism by Eugene O'Neill. A note says "from Agnes and Mac." Could it be important?

Thus began the discovery of O'Neill's "lost" one-act play Exorcism, all copies of which he had reportedly destroyed. O'Neill had burned manuscripts before, but not those good enough to be produced. Exorcism had been staged: On March 26, 1920, the Provincetown Players opened a two-week run of the play at the Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village.

So why did O'Neill try to destory this play? It got mixed reviews, but so had others. Exorcism was different: a stark dramatization of O'Neill's attempted suicide and reported emotional rebirth in 1912. Some say it revealed too much about his family, especially since his father was dying at the time. More likely, it revealed too much of O'Neill, even for this most autobiographical of playwrights.

After Faith Yordan's discovery in February 2011, TV executive and UCLA professor Paul Nagle contacted Diane Schinnerer, longtime officer of the Eugene O'Neill Society and Eugene O'Neill Foundation, as well as archivist of the foundation's library. "She asked me two questions," Nagle recalls. "Did it have a character name Jimmy? Was it about a suicide?" Both answers were yes.

Nagle approached representatives from Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, who recognized O'Neill's handwriting and knew that "Agnes and Mac" were O'Neill's discarded second wife Agnes Boulton and her then spouse, Morris (Mac) Kaufman. Boulton biographer W.D. King says O'Neill probably left Exorcism behind in his rush to be with Carlotta Monterey, the woman who would eventually become his third wife. Horowitz then presented the 23-page document to Louise Bernard, curator at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Yale acquired the manuscript in June, and the New Yorker magazine published it in the Oct. 17 issue. Next year Yale University press will publish Exorcism along with a facsimile of the manuscript with O'Neill's handwritten revisions.

O'Neill said of the play, "The sooner all memory of it dies the better pleased I'll be." Maura O'Neill Jones, daughter of O'Neill's son Shane--a suicide--disagrees. "This will give up-and-coming playwrights a look into the growth of a genius," she says. "It was a little hard to read because of all the suicides in the family, but also uplifting because he worked it out." -- Jo Morello

The Washington Post, October 9, 2011

The professional archive of Nobel Prize-winning writer J.M. Coetzee will be housed at the University of Texas’ Harry Ransom Center humanities library, providing a rare glimpse into the man considered a master storyteller of the South African experience and public injustice.

The Ransom Center’s $1.5 million acquisition of the Coetzee collection was scheduled to be formally announced Monday. The collection purchased using private grants and university money includes 155 boxes of manuscripts, notebooks, essays, speeches and letters to his publishers dating back to 1956.

The New York Times, June 20, 2010

In the mid-1960s, when John Updike began giving selected papers to the Houghton Library at Harvard University, they were cataloged and, for the most part, made available to researchers. But after an amendment to the tax law in 1969 eliminated the sizable deductions authors reaped from such donations, Updike, though he continued to deposit papers, did so only for warehousing purposes. He retained ownership of this material and let very few look at it. The calculation was proprietary. His literary cosmos was still expanding, and he was loath to expose its workings.

The New York Times, June 16, 2010

When Nicholas Ray, the pathbreaking filmmaker and director of “Rebel Without a Cause,” died from lung cancer in 1979, he left behind a substantial collection of artifacts that had never, or rarely, been seen. There is, for instance, the original typed treatment for “Rebel” with a bizarre twist that had Plato (played by Sal Mineo in the 1955 film) shoot Jim (James Dean) and commit suicide by falling on a live grenade, as well as an unfinished experimental movie, “We Can’t Go Home Again,” to which Ray devoted the last years of his life.

The New Yorker, December 9, 2009

Last Friday, Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter sold at Christie’s for a staggering $254,500 to an anonymous American collector. “I have typed on this typewriter every book I have written including three not yet published,” McCarthy wrote in his authentication letter. Of the machine—an Olivetti Lettera 32—Glenn Horowitz, a rare-book dealer who handled the auction for McCarthy, told the New York Times:

When I grasped that some of the most complex, almost otherworldly fiction of the postwar era was composed on such a simple, functional, frail-looking machine, it conferred a sort of talismanic quality to Cormac’s typewriter. It’s as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss Army knife.

The New York Times, November 30, 2009

Cormac McCarthy has written more than a dozen novels, several screenplays, two plays, two short stories, countless drafts, letters and more — and nearly every one of them was tapped out on a portable Olivetti manual typewriter he bought in a Knoxville, Tenn., pawnshop around 1963 for $50.

The New Yorker, June 11, 2007

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the literary archive of the University of Texas at Austin, contains thirty-six million manuscript pages, five million photographs, a million books, and ten thousand objects, including a lock of Byron’s curly brown hair. It houses one of the forty-eight complete Gutenberg Bibles; a rare first edition of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” which Lewis Carroll and his illustrator, John Tenniel, thought poorly printed, and which they suppressed; one of Jack Kerouac’s spiral-bound journals for “On the Road”; and Ezra Pound’s copy of “The Waste Land,” in which Eliot scribbled his famous dedication: “For E. P., miglior fabbro, from T. S. E.” Putting a price on the collection would be impossible: What is the value of a first edition of “Comus,” containing corrections in Milton’s own hand? Or the manuscript for “The Green Dwarf,” a story that Charlotte Brontë wrote in minuscule lettering, to discourage adult eyes, and then made into a book for her siblings? Or the corrected proofs of “Ulysses,” on which James Joyce rewrote parts of the novel? The university insures the center’s archival holdings, as a whole, for a billion dollars.

The New York Times, March 5, 2007

When writers die, their work lives on — and their papers go to Texas. Or Yale, Harvard, Emory, the New York Public Library, the British Library and other scholarly institutions that collect authors’ manuscripts and correspondence. How such papers change hands — and find monetary value — is the result of a peculiar alchemy between market forces and literary reputations.

House and Garden, March 11, 2005

For the first time the public has access to Vita Sackville-West's truly remarkable and varied literary archive.

The New York Times, April 21, 1999

The novelist, lepidopterist, translator and teacher known as V N, V. Sirin, Vasily Shishkov, Vivian Dark bloom and Vladimir Nabokov would have turned 100 this Friday. The birthday party has begun without him. If he had scripted it himself, he could not have produced a better nightmare.

Town and Country, December 11, 1998

Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in New York celebrated James Joyce's greatest work in the store's "Novel of the Century" exhibition.

The New York Times, May 7, 1996

From Teamster's Shelves to Dealer's Hands, An Urban Tale of Collecting Rare Editions - This is a New York story about a rare book dealer, a Teamsters boss and James Joyce. It includes anxious moments at an auction at Christie's, corruption at the powerful teamsters' union Local 810 near Union Square and brief appearances by Carter Burden, the politician and socialite, as well as Steve Forbes, the publishing heir and short-time presidential candidate.