Collection of love letters written by Bob Dylan sold for $670K

Bob Dylan's private love letters to his highschool girlfriend have been bought at public sale.
AP

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

The Livraria Lello in Porto, Portugal, which payments itself as “the World’s Most Stunning Bookshop,” plans to maintain the archive of 42 handwritten letters totaling 150 pages full and out there for Dylan followers and students to review, auctioneer RR Public sale stated in an announcement Friday.

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

Remarkably, in a number of the letters, Dylan writes about altering his identify and hoping to promote 1,000,000 data. Many years later, the now 81-year-old Dylan and 2016 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature has bought about 125 million data.

Together with him confessing his like to his highschool girlfriend, the letters additionally include future aspersions Dylan has towards changing into a musician.

AP

The younger musician additionally expresses his affection for Hewitt, invitations her to a Buddy Holly present, consists of little fragments of poetry, and talks in regards to the kinds 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 had been despatched to the Hewitt household’s new dwelling within the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburb of New Brighton.

The gathering is made up of 42 handwritten letters totaling 150 pages.

AP

A number of different objects of Dylan memorabilia had been additionally bought 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 bought for nearly $250,000; and one of many earliest identified signed images of Dylan that went for greater than $24,000.