(Boston) A collection of love letters written by a young Bob Dylan to his high school girlfriend fetched nearly $670,000 at a famous Portuguese bookstore at auction.
The Porto-based Livraria Lello, which boasts of being “the most beautiful bookstore in the world”, plans to preserve these 42 hand-written letters totaling 150 pages and make them available to Dylan admirers and scholars. , said the RR Auction house on Friday.
Young Bob Zimmerman – the singer-poet’s Christian name – wrote the letters to Barbara Ann Hewitt from 1957 to 1959. These missives shed light on a lesser-known period of Dylan.
In some letters he talks about changing his name. He also says he hopes to sell a million albums. Several decades later, Dylan, now 81 and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, has sold around 125 million albums.
The young musician expresses his affection for Barbara Ann. He invites her to a Buddy Holly concert, writes fragments of poetry for her, and discusses things that have preoccupied generations of high school students such as cars, clothes, and music.
Barbara Ann Hewitt’s daughter discovered the letters after her mother’s death in 2020. They had been sent to the Hewitt family’s new home in New Brighton, a suburb of Minneapolis-St. Paul. The address is handwritten by Dylan.
Several other Dylan-related items sold during the auction, including 24 “untitled poems” written while he was studying at the University of Minnesota, which sold for $250,000. A series of autographed photographs, among the first of the musician, have been sold for more than $24,000.