A group of touching and sometimes prescient personal letters written by a young Bob Dylan to a highschool girlfriend has been sold at auction to a renowned Portuguese bookshop for nearly $670,000.
The Livraria Lello in Porto, Portugal, which bills itself as “the World’s Most Beautiful Bookshop,” plans to maintain the archive of 42 handwritten letters totaling 150 pages complete and available for Dylan fans and students to review, auctioneer RR Auction said in an announcement Friday.
Dylan, a native of Hibbing, Minnesota, wrote the letters to Barbara Ann Hewitt between 1957 and 1959 when he was still referred to as Bob Zimmerman. They supply an insight right into a period of his lifetime of which not much is thought.
Remarkably, in a number of the letters, Dylan writes about changing his name and hoping to sell 1,000,000 records. Many years later, the now 81-year-old Dylan and 2016 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature has sold about 125 million records.
The young musician also expresses his affection for Hewitt, invites her to a Buddy Holly show, includes little fragments of poetry, and talks in regards to the types of things that generations of highschool students have been concerned about, corresponding to cars, clothes and music.
Hewitt’s daughter found the letters after her mother died in 2020. The unique envelopes addressed in Dylan’s handwriting were sent to the Hewitt family’s latest home within the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburb of Recent Brighton.
Several other items of Dylan memorabilia were also sold on the auction, including an archive of 24 “Poems Without Titles” written when the singer-songwriter attended the University of Minnesota, which sold for nearly $250,000; and one in every of the earliest known signed photographs of Dylan that went for greater than $24,000.
A group of touching and sometimes prescient personal letters written by a young Bob Dylan to a highschool girlfriend has been sold at auction to a renowned Portuguese bookshop for nearly $670,000.
The Livraria Lello in Porto, Portugal, which bills itself as “the World’s Most Beautiful Bookshop,” plans to maintain the archive of 42 handwritten letters totaling 150 pages complete and available for Dylan fans and students to review, auctioneer RR Auction said in an announcement Friday.
Dylan, a native of Hibbing, Minnesota, wrote the letters to Barbara Ann Hewitt between 1957 and 1959 when he was still referred to as Bob Zimmerman. They supply an insight right into a period of his lifetime of which not much is thought.
Remarkably, in a number of the letters, Dylan writes about changing his name and hoping to sell 1,000,000 records. Many years later, the now 81-year-old Dylan and 2016 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature has sold about 125 million records.
The young musician also expresses his affection for Hewitt, invites her to a Buddy Holly show, includes little fragments of poetry, and talks in regards to the types of things that generations of highschool students have been concerned about, corresponding to cars, clothes and music.
Hewitt’s daughter found the letters after her mother died in 2020. The unique envelopes addressed in Dylan’s handwriting were sent to the Hewitt family’s latest home within the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburb of Recent Brighton.
Several other items of Dylan memorabilia were also sold on the auction, including an archive of 24 “Poems Without Titles” written when the singer-songwriter attended the University of Minnesota, which sold for nearly $250,000; and one in every of the earliest known signed photographs of Dylan that went for greater than $24,000.
