A Controversial Rare-Book Dealer Tries to Rewrite His Own Ending | Hacker News Reader

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

newyorker.com

81 pointsacabal34 comments

Charges dropped.

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

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.”

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?

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

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

is this the first documented time "you are holding it wrong" is literally and technically true?

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

It also crashes my Chrome tab on Android.

Switch to the "Tabs" tab and kill it?

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.

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.”

> Why would they outbid each other to waste more public or non profit money?

Because like it or not, even public and non-profit institutions are in competition with one another. Maybe not for money specifically, but prestige, notoriety and having access to single “one-of-a-kind” items. All of those bring more attention, publicity and funding.

If you want to see or review the original drafts of an author, you can only do that at the single location that has those papers and documentation. Every one of these things is worth exactly as much as they will bring in in additional funding and notoriety. If these institutions are being snowed it is because of their own hubris and overestimation of the value of the artifacts in question.

But my (limited) understanding is this sort of arbitrary pricing, valuations and “just this side of legal/ethical if you don’t ask too many questions” is par for the course in any museum/artifact business. History once it passes out of memory is all about stories. And the value of any given item is how good of a story it can be made to tell, and how that story will bring in audiences. The skeleton of a crocodile might be interesting, but not worth much. The skeleton of a crocodile that was estimated to have been alive at the end of the age of dinosaurs is a story to sell, even if to someone viewing the bones there’s no difference.

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.

A well written article, but it could probably have been like 10% of the length.

You can always run it through an LLM to create a summary of any desired length. Never know what you'll be missing, though. You might actually enjoy the experience of reading the original article yourself. Try it, see how it goes?

Assuming the summary is accurate. Which I'm not sure is the case - as it happens, yesterday an actual LLM summary of OP struck me as missing important parts: https://www.reddit.com/r/Longreads/comments/1g8so93/a_contro...

It's accurate but not deep enough. It's pretty important to specify the summary length you're after, in my experience, rather than just leaving it up to the model.

I asked GPT4o explicitly for an 800-word summary just now, roughly one page of single-spaced text, and I really don't see how it could have done much better: https://chatgpt.com/share/671810c7-477c-800b-a752-376ce6074a...

I wonder how much shorter Crime and Punishment could have been made!

"Keenly attuned to his guests’ networks and net worths" is a cute turn of phrase.

Watch out for this story, it'll suck you in.

I have just lost an hour of my workday. A good longform profile of a single controversial character will do that to me.

Exactly the sort of darling that that my college tutor would have said needed to be killed. “Yes, I know you’re very proud of it…”

A couple well-placed em-dashes and at least it doesn’t read like the author is trying to rap.

Why would they say that it needs to be killed? To what end?

The phrase "kill your darlings" circulates in fiction writing schools. The reasoning is that a "darling" turn of phrase which the author really likes is likely something that they are irrationally obsessed over and that distorts the editing process around itself, to the detriment of overall quality.

Like a lot of writing advice this is really subjective.

I feel like this comes up with me in programming too! Like if I write some really beautiful function as part of solving a problem, I will be a lot sadder if it doesn't make it in, sometimes to my detriment. Similar energy to "cattle not pets".

Probably the most important lesson my C mentor ever told me: "Never be afraid to delete code, no matter how nice you think it is." It still hasn't fully landed with me, and I can relate to what you wrote. But I am trying to.

As well as "Build one to throw away. You will anyway."

I think it boils down to "nobody likes a showoff", really.

Again, subjective. Some people like it and it can be a valid literary art form in itself. It's only in purely utilitarian text like technical writing where it doesn't belong.

I'm not who you're replying to, but I agree with them. For my taste, it's a little too clever. It distracts from the subject of the text and instead draws attention to the form of the text itself and its author.

Worse than that, it's clunky-sounding and trips me up verbally.

That's subjective, of course, but I would have preferred if the author had left out this turn of phrase.

I see what you mean (it doesn't quite work for me either), but it works for some people, so eh. I guess the sibling is right, it's subjective.

Eh, how often do you get to drop a new zeugma? I'll allow it.

https://archive.is/v4CBl

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