It was at a rare book fair in London that a dealer sensing that I was Indian—or at least South Asian—came up to me and asked if I knew Glenn Horowitz. “Who?” I said. “I’m surprised you don’t know him,” the dealer replied, “I’m referring to the famed American dealer in high end literary manuscripts whose personal passion as a collector has been pursuing Indian rare books and manuscripts.” I was elated hearing this—at least there was one collector sufficiently interested in forming a collection related to the Indian subcontinent’s rather elusive antiquarian material. Since this little exchange a few years ago, I’ve always wondered what the collection contained, and if at some point scholars, bibliophiles and collectors could view it.
Happily, it turns out now, the Lilly Library at Indiana University has just acquired the Glenn Horowitz collection related to South Asia, and is showcasing part of it in an exhibit titled India, Empire, Nation. The exhibition opened this January and will be on till May 13, 2017. As a rare book dealer, Horowitz is best known for dealing in very high stakes literary archives, having brokered and shepherded the sale of the papers (manuscripts, letters, typescripts) of Mailer, Nabokov, Gordimer, Heller, Marquez, Coetzee, and Bob Dylan, to name a few. I wrote to the collector asking him to share some thoughts on his India collection.
Nostalgic moments
“When I visited the Lilly Library,” Horowitz wrote back, “for the opening of the exhibition, the strongest sentiment I experienced was nostalgia: I knew where I acquired every book; from whom I got it; what I paid; and what I felt when I first handled the copy. I did have a sort of North Star as I collected a Platonic Ideal for what I wanted to acquire: books printed in India in remote areas that weren’t recorded in standard Western resource books. One of the books that makes me grin whenever I think about it was a pocket-sized volume, published in Benares in 1875 by one Mr. Khan—it was titled Memoirs of a Constable and was bound in delicate pebbled purplish Indian cloth…I think this might be the earliest first person narrative by an Indian police officer printed in India.”
The exhibit showcases a range of antiquarian books in the Horowitz collection—primarily imprints from the 18th century down to the turn of the 20th century. Books and letters related to the 1857 Uprising, early printed books in Bengal, British Raj ethnographica, obscure books on classical and vernacular languages, the East India Company, subaltern records, beautiful bird books, unusual religious books with fascinating colour plates and some intriguing nationalist ephemera including a clutch of telegrams from M.K. Gandhi to various people, as well as a book signed by him.
I also spoke with Joel Silver, Director and Librarian of Lilly, on their interest in acquiring the Horowitz collection. “The Lilly Library,” said Silver, “has long collected materials that related to India…The Horowitz collection complements these areas very well, and fills in many gaps in the Library’s historical and linguistic collections, among many other areas. The opportunity to acquire the Horowitz Collection allowed us to strengthen greatly our holdings related to India, and to support the research needs of the strong and growing programme of India Studies at Indiana University.”
Professor Michael S. Dodson, Director of Dhar India Studies Programme and curator of this exhibit, told me that his favourite in the collection was “the annotated Sanskrit-English dictionary of Fitz-Edward Hall, who was a professor at the Benares Sanskrit College in the 1850s.” The copy at Lilly is Hall’s personal copy, signed and annotated by the scholar! Dodson notes in his introduction to India, Empire, Nation that “taken together, these materials tell a compelling story of South Asia over the past two centuries, and they do so from distinctive and often surprising vantage points.”
Though the Horowitz collection is not especially high end, where the focus is usually early imprints from the 16th century when printing first came to India, or typographic landmarks, or even modern literary first editions and association copies, it is still nevertheless rather juicily rich in bibliophilic British India imprints. What I’d like to term ‘Indiana’ (as in Americana): a diverse range of little known and hard to find antiquarian volumes (in the best condition possible and often in their original bindings) printed in India and Britain on several aspects of life in colonial India.
Convinced collector
Horowitz himself says he began collecting in this area “compulsively, daily, almost promiscuously… And I grew to believe that my conviction that printed material and manuscripts could tell the long winding narrative of India’s emergence as a modern nation was spot on.” Finally, I asked the collector if selling off his India collection meant he was no longer pursuing this line of collecting, and he replied: “I like to think that the transaction with the Lilly is not the end of my Indian book gathering but rather simply a new beginning. I can’t imagine a finer custodian for what I put together than Dr. Silver and his colleagues. I’m proud to have some of my books I gathered housed at the Lilly.” The story of Glenn Horowitz, intrepid collector of “Indiana”, is not, I feel, completely or well told here—that will have to keep for the next column.
The writer is a bibliophile, columnist and critic.
