A collection of touching and sometimes prescient own letters prepared by a younger Bob Dylan to a substantial faculty girlfriend has been marketed at auction to a renowned Portuguese bookshop for nearly $670,000.
The Livraria Lello in Porto, Portugal, which payments alone as “the World’s Most Lovely Bookshop,” options to hold the archive of 42 handwritten letters totaling 150 web pages complete and offered for Dylan lovers and scholars to research, auctioneer RR Auction mentioned in a assertion Friday.
Dylan, a native of Hibbing, Minnesota, wrote the letters to Barbara Ann Hewitt amongst 1957 and 1959 when he was even now identified as Bob Zimmerman. They supply an perception into a interval of his daily life of which not a great deal is recognized.
Remarkably, in some of the letters Dylan writes about switching his name and hoping to promote a million records. Many years afterwards, the now 81-yr-previous Dylan and 2016 receiver of the Nobel Prize in Literature has sold about 125 million records.
The youthful musician also expresses his passion for Hewitt, invites her to a Buddy Holly show, consists of minimal fragments of poetry, and talks about the kinds of factors that generations of high college learners have been anxious about, these as automobiles, garments and songs.
A jersey worn by Chicago Bulls legend Michael Jordan in the 1998 NBA Finals marketed at an auction for $10.1 million.
Hewitt’s daughter located the letters just after her mother died in 2020. The unique envelopes addressed in Dylan’s handwriting had been sent to the Hewitt family’s new dwelling in the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburb of New Brighton.
Various other products of Dylan memorabilia ended up also offered at the auction, such as an archive of 24 “Poems Without Titles” penned when the singer-songwriter attended the College of Minnesota, which sold for practically $250,000 and one of the earliest acknowledged signed pictures of Dylan that went for a lot more than $24,000.
