Glenn Horowitz on the sale and placement of author archives

Glenn Horowitz is an agent in the sale and placement of culturally significant archives to research institutions throughout the United States. Authors, artists, musicians, designers, and photographers he has represented include Norman Mailer, James Salter, Deborah Eisenberg, David Foster Wallace, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Grushkin, the Magnum Group, Nadine Gordimer, and Danny Fields.

I met Glenn in his Manhattan offices. We talked about, among other things, the imaginative packaging of authors' archives, the maturing of research institutions, kaboosing like collections, natural sympathies, technology coming on line, letterpress printing as a nostalgic gasp, the shift to digital, Bob Dylan's archive, the Woodie Guthrie Center, the transformation of Tulsa, the Kaiser Foundation, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Watergate and the University of Texas, the importance of the creative process, New Criticism, identity politics, the melting of textual studies, the growing importance of ancillary material; Bernard Malamud, Bob Giroux, Strand Bookstore, envy, small versus major research institutes, Michael Ondaatje, Canada's lack of interest in its writers' papers, Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Conrad Black, FDR, and archives as a non-traditional market.