PIVOTAL, SEMINAL, RARE

He built an empire in high-end books. Then a rock star pressed charges.

- TAD FRIEND

If Glenn Horowitz comes calling, should you be flattered or alarmed? It means that you have an exceptional literary reputation. It also means that your time on earth is nearly up.

Horowitz, a rare-book dealer of matchless temerity and flair, has sold the papers and possessions of more Nobel laureates than anyone else; he describes himself, with derisive pride, as "the Grim Reaper with a sack of shekels on his back." He sold the archives of Gabriel García Márquez, J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, and Bob Dylan, as well as books from Derek Walcott's library, manuscripts of Seamus Heaney poems and Saul Bellow stories, spicy letters that he acquired from one of William Faulkner's mistresses, and Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yiddish typewriter.

He also sold Alice Walker's papers for $1 million, Vladimir Nabokov's for $1.375 million, Cormac McCarthy's for $2 million, Norman Mailer's for $2.5 million, and John Updike's for $3 million, arranging a deal between Harvard University and Updike's widow a few years after Updike said that allowing him into the house would be like "visiting the undertaker who's going to bury me."

Horowitz's knock is the scrape of the chisel on your tombstone. When he was preparing to sell Tony Kushner's archive, Kushner insisted that he not be marketed as the "Angels in America" guy, a one-hit-wonder. The dealer replied, "If you hadn't written 'Angels in America,' we wouldn't be having this conversation."