Bob Dylan’s Assortment of Love Letters Promote for $670K at Public sale – Billboard

A group of touching and generally prescient private letters written by a younger Bob Dylan to a highschool girlfriend has been offered at public sale to a famend Portuguese bookshop for almost $670,000.

The Livraria Lello in Porto, Portugal, which payments itself as “the World’s Most Lovely Bookshop,” plans to maintain the archive of 42 handwritten letters totaling 150 pages full and obtainable for Dylan followers and students to review, auctioneer RR Public sale mentioned in a press release Friday (Nov. 18).

Dylan, a local of Hibbing, Minnesota, wrote the letters to Barbara Ann Hewitt between 1957 and 1959 when he was nonetheless referred to as Bob Zimmerman. They supply an perception right into a interval of his lifetime of which not a lot is understood.

Remarkably, in a few of the letters Dylan writes about altering his title and hoping to promote one million data. A long time later, the now 81-year-old Dylan and 2016 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature has offered about 125 million data.

The younger musician additionally expresses his affection for Hewitt, invitations her to a Buddy Holly present, contains little fragments of poetry, and talks concerning the types of issues that generations of highschool college students have been involved about, corresponding to vehicles, garments and music.

Hewitt’s daughter discovered the letters after her mom died in 2020. The unique envelopes addressed in Dylan’s handwriting have been despatched to the Hewitt household’s new dwelling within the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburb of New Brighton.

A number of different gadgets of Dylan memorabilia have been additionally offered on the public sale, together with an archive of 24 “Poems With out Titles” written when the singer-songwriter attended the College of Minnesota, which offered for nearly $250,000; and one of many earliest recognized signed pictures of Dylan that went for greater than $24,000.