Bob Dylan Love Letter Collection Sells for $670,000

A collection of personal letters from a young Bob Dylan to his high school girlfriend has sold at auction to a prominent Portuguese bookstore for almost $670,000 (£564,000).

Livraria Lello in Porto, Portugal, which bills itself as “the most beautiful bookstore in the world,” plans to preserve a complete archive of 42 150-page handwritten letters for Dylan fans and scholars to study, said RR Auction, an auctioneer in Boston, Mass. .

Dylan, who grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota, wrote letters to Barbara Ann Hewitt between 1957 and 1959, when he was still known as Bob Zimmerman. They offer insight into a little-known period of his life.

It’s worth noting that in some of the letters Dylan wrote, he wrote about changing the name and hoping to sell a million records. Decades later, Dylan, 81, and the 2016 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, has sold some 125 million records.

The young musician also professed his affection for Ms. Hewitt, inviting her to a Buddy Holly performance, which included bits of poetry and talked about cars, clothes and music.

Ms Hewitt’s daughter found the letters after her mother died in 2020. The original envelope, addressed in Dylan’s handwriting, was mailed to the Hewitts’ new home in New Brighton, a suburb of Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Several other Dylan memorabilia also sold at the auction, including an archive of 24 “Untitled Poems”, written by the singer-songwriter while he was a student at the University of Minnesota, which sold for almost £210,000, and Dylan, one of the earliest known signed photographs of Dylan, fetched over £20,200.