The longer term singing legend wrote the letters to a highschool girlfriend between 1957 and 1959 when he was nonetheless referred to as Bob Zimmerman.
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 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 accessible for Dylan followers and students to review, auctioneer RR Public sale mentioned in a press release Friday.
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 among the letters Dylan writes about altering his identify and hoping to promote one million information. A long time later, the now 81-year-old Dylan and 2016 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature has offered about 125 million information.
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 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.
A number of different objects of Dylan memorabilia had 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.