Bob Dylan’s Love Letters Sell For $670K at Auction

A young Bob Dylan’s collection of heartfelt and occasionally prescient personal letters to a high school sweetheart was purchased for approximately $670,000 at an auction by a renowned Portuguese bookshop.

The record of 42 handwritten letters, comprising 150 pages, will be preserved by the Livraria Lello in Porto, Portugal, which calls itself ‘the World’s Most Beautiful Bookshop,’ according to a statement from the auctioneer RR Auction. It will be made available for Dylan fans and scholars to study.

While still going by Bob Zimmerman, Dylan, a native of Hibbing, Minnesota, penned the letters to Barbara Ann Hewitt between 1957 and 1959. They shed light on a time in his life about which little is known.

Surprisingly, Dylan mentions changing his name and wishing to sell a million records in a few of the letters. The now 81-year-old Dylan, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, has sold around 125 million records over the course of his career.

The young musician also professes his love for Hewitt, asks her out to a Buddy Holly concert, throws in a few lines of poetry and discusses topics that previous generations of high school students have found interesting, such as cars, clothes and music.

After her mother’s passing in 2020, Hewitt’s daughter discovered the letters. The initial envelopes, written in Dylan’s handwriting, were sent to the Hewitt family’s new residence in the New Brighton neighbourhood of Minneapolis-St. Paul.

A number of other items of Bob Dylan memorabilia were also sold at the auction, including one of the earliest known signed photos of Dylan, which sold for more than $24,000, and a collection of 24 ‘Poems Without Titles’ written while the singer-songwriter was a student at the University of Minnesota. The collection of poems sold for almost $250,000.

–Silviya.Y