Backlist: The Eagle and the Bookseller
Glenn Horowitz, Don Henley, and the alleged theft of Hotel California
A version of this piece was originally sent to my email list on July 25, 2022
On the off chance you missed this news, one of the leading rare book dealers in the world, Glenn Horowitz, was arrested in July 2022 in connection with the theft and attempted sale of Don Henley’s working drafts of “Hotel California” and other Eagles songs.
If the name Glenn Horowitz doesn’t ring a bell for you, that may be because you aren’t rich enough to buy from him. He tends to sell things like the archives of Bob Dylan and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Cormac McCarthy. His periodic printed catalogs, like the one devoted to books inscribed by Vladimir Nabokov to his wife, are marvels of scholarship, description, and astounding rarity.
The short version of this most recent chapter in his career is this:
Back in the late 1970s, a writer working on a never-published book about the Eagles ended up with some of Don Henley’s notebooks. Fifteen years later, the writer sold the notebooks to Glenn Horowitz for $50,000. Horowitz sold them to two collectors, a rock-and-roll curator and the owner of a small auction house, for $65,000.
About ten years ago, the collectors tried to sell the manuscripts. Don Henley found out and claimed they were stolen. He filed a police report, 25 years after the fact. The collectors continued to try to sell the notebooks despite Henley’s claims. Police eventually seized the Eagles’ songbooks in 2017. Five more years passed and the Manhattan District Attorney filed charges against Horowitz and the two collectors for possession of stolen merchandise, conspiracy, and in Horowitz’s case, hindering a prosecution.
If you are really interested, you can read the DA’s press release and the indictment.
Taken out of context, the emails the prosecution have published look bad. The four men (the writer, the dealer, the curator, and the auctioneer) have changed their stories over time and worked together to come up with a story of provenance that would allow the manuscripts to be sold. Horowitz was in the middle of this exchange, fielding requests for more information from his customers and asking the writer to provide more details about how he came to have the Eagles’s song manuscripts in the first place.
Normally, in a theft case, the prosecution has to prove that a theft occurred. Don Henley apparently didn’t know his manuscripts were missing for 25 years (or at least he didn’t care enough to report them stolen or file an insurance claim before that). Can he really prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he or his staff didn’t give them to the writer, back in the 1970s? I’m not so sure, at least not without the writer admitting to the theft.
In the first place, the Eagles were famous for their insane cocaine use. Even the members of Black Sabbath were astounded by the quantities involved. Who can really say what might have happened when they were high? And at the time, no one thought the manuscripts of just-written songs were particularly valuable. It was only when other lyrics from the 1960s and 1970s began fetching high prices that Henley seems to have taken notice (Don McLean’s lyrics to “American Pie” sold for $1.2 million in 2015).
However, the Manhattan DA is not alleging a theft. He is stating it as fact. According to a footnote in the press release, “All factual recitations are derived from documents filed in court and statements made on the record in court.” What the “fact” of the theft is has not been made clear, and it may be a strategy of the DA to keep some evidence hidden until he is compelled by a court to share it.
If all the DA has is Don Henley saying there was a theft that he didn’t notice for 25 years, then the prosecution may well have a hard time making the case. If the writer has plead guilty to some charge or other and admitted the theft, then the question is did Horowitz and company know and believe that the manuscripts were stolen? I, of course, don’t know.
From the publicly available evidence, there was an attempt to concoct a provenance story that would satisfy potential buyers. But the fact is that for most collectible books and manuscripts, provenance stories are just that, stories told to make buyers feel more comfortable because the true facts are unknown and often unknowable. How many items in your collection can you trace from the original source to you? How many of those steps could be proven in court? Probably not very many.
Horowitz and his buyers got in trouble for trying to prove the impossible—that they owned the lyrics fair and square. In the absence of a letter from Henley giving the lyrics away, his claim that they were stolen is sufficient to cloud the title. The only alternative was to let him have them back, however unfair that might be. But I am sure it’s hard to give up what the curator and auctioneer thought would be a seven-figure payday.
A few years ago, when I faced a similar situation (but with only a five-figure payday in the works), my attorney told me to give up the fight for ownership, and so I reluctantly did. In my case, the police determined that the manuscript wasn’t stolen. But since a police report was filed, I’d never be able to sell it with clear title, unless I was willing to wage a long and expensive legal battle—that I might not win—to have title awarded to me through a court order. And that, my attorney told me, was the best-case scenario, assuming the person who filed the police report didn’t show up to court.
I will be very interested to see how this Eagles story plays out. If it’s all a big misunderstanding, I feel very bad for the damage it will do to Glenn Horowitz’s reputation. If it is true, I will feel bad about how it makes the book trade look.
—Scott Brown
After I wrote this…
The writer of the never-published Eagles book who sold the lyrics to Glenn Horowitz was revealed to be Ed Sanders, known to many book collectors as the force behind Fuck You, one of the most provocative small presses of the early 1960s. Music lovers will know him as a founding member of the Fugs.
The lawyers for the accused filed court motions challenging Don Henley’s claim that the lyrics were, in fact, stolen.
Stories about the case can be read in Rolling Stone:
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/eagles-hotel-california-motion-to-dismiss-1234588181/