Hacker Remix

A Controversial Rare-Book Dealer Tries to Rewrite His Own Ending

73 points by acabal 1 day ago | 32 comments

brg 1 day ago

Charges dropped.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/nyregion/don-henley-eagle...

kleiba 22 hours ago

https://archive.is/5Wu3G

verisimi 21 hours ago

I love this line:

> Rick Gekoski, a book dealer who did business with Mr. Horowitz, described him in 2007 as “a terrific combination of a scholar and a grifter.”

a1o 21 hours ago

This magazine shows a pop that makes Safari ignore the gesture to go back, can't scroll up to go back to the address bar. For people using Safari on iPhone, is there any secret gesture to kill a tab like this?

Karellen 13 hours ago

Rotate the phone to landscape mode, and then into portrait. The address and tab bars should be displayed on the change to portrait.

a1o 5 hours ago

That's a very good idea! Thanks! I will use this approach next time I encounter something like this!

ycombinete 20 hours ago

Put it into reader mode as soon as the page loads, before the pop-up spawns.

Pikamander2 15 hours ago

It also crashes my Chrome tab on Android.

lynx23 17 hours ago

Switch to the "Tabs" tab and kill it?

blantonl 15 hours ago

Just enough admiration by the author to make someone think they should be like this guy, and approaching life like him is appropriate.

Walking away after reading that article, I don't know whether or not to be appalled, or intrigued by the intricacies of the book collecting world and this dude.

One thing is for certain, if someone owed me six figures and they just hand waved it away with a slight of hand, I'd start throwing some chairs.

hristov 13 hours ago

What a scumbag. Make sure to read to the end of the article to read about things that he undoubtedly stole. Good job by the New Yorker journalist getting to the bottom of things and not being charmed by this psychopath. Very good article overall.

It is very depressing to see large public and non profit institutions be snowed in by his showmanship and spending millions of their funds on this glorified celebrity worship. It is good for museums to have letters of famous writers and their notes and such but it is an absolute waste for them to pay millions when they can pay hundreds of thousands. For most of these archives it seems that most and all bidders would be public or non profit institutions. Why would they outbid each other to waste more public or non profit money? In many cases it seems like there was no competitive bidding at all, horowitz merely came in with a crazy high price and they agreed to it. If they had a bit of a back bone they could have done the deals for much less.

But it was quite hilarious to read how he convinced other thieves to buy his overpriced collections. I can imagine his sales pitch “you will be so respected if you become an antique books and manuscripts collector! You will be the cream of society. They will forget about your business dealings.”

blantonl 12 hours ago

He was a market maker where there was very little liquidity. Given that, all valuations in this world are subjective at best. He just made more liquidity than most, so the process of spitballing valuations became more focused on one individual doing it. Him. He just sprinkled in a little sociopathy to make it more beneficial to him.