1996, Shopping Feature, “The Globe Guy: Worlds of Difference,” Elle Decor

Elle Decor
“The Globe Guy: Worlds of Difference”
By Elizabeth Shaw
Photo by Susan Salinger
1996
p. 112

George was visited by Elle Decor two years after opening his gallery, and playfully posed for a photograph among objects, including an 1872 Henry Bryant Celestial Indicator and a large American zodiac globe from the 1920s.

The objects in George D. Glazer’s Upper East Side gallery do not lack for personality, and neither does their keeper. Glazer, who claims to be the country’s only dealer specializing in 19th-century American globes, offers spheres ranging from a novelty cigarette lighter…to a pair of Gilman Joslin floor globes…in addition to a variety of 18th- to 20th-century works on paper, from traditional English sporting scenes to a 1907 lithograph of a smiling polar bear. After graduating from law school in 1983, Glazer started furnishing a new apartment and became fascinated with the “pieces of humanity” he found at tag sales and auctions. In 1988, he answered an ad from the rare-map and print dealer Graham W. Arader III…Glazer recalls, “It was my chance at a second career and I took it.” After four years with Arader, Glazer left to deal privately; he opened his gallery in October 1994. “These globes are what America was and is, in terms of invention and going forward,” he says, using as an example a Celestial Indicator patented in 1872. “Globes just never found their own niche.”