A collection of poignant and sometimes prescient personal letters written by a young Bob Dylan to a high school sweetheart has been auctioned off at a well-known Portuguese bookstore for nearly $670,000.
Porto’s Livraria Lello, which bills itself as the “most beautiful bookstore in the world,” plans to keep the archive of 42 handwritten letters totaling 150 pages complete and available to Dylan fans and scholars, he said the auction house.RR Auction.
Dylan, originally from Hibbing, Minnesota, wrote the letters to Barbara Ann Hewitt between 1957 and 1959 while still known as Bob Zimmerman. The letters offer a glimpse into a period of his life about which not much is known.
Surprisingly, in some cards Bob Dylan writes that he changed his name and sold millions of records. Decades later, Dylan, now 81 and winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, has sold an estimated 125 million records.
The young musician expresses his affection for Hewitt, he invites her to a Buddy Holly concertit includes snippets of poetry and speeches about the sorts of things that have occupied teenage minds for generations, like cars, clothes, and music.
Hewitt’s daughter found the letters after her mother died in 2020. The original envelopes in Dylan’s handwriting were sent to the Hewitt family’s new home in New Brighton, a suburb of Minneapolis-St. Paul.
Many other Dylan memorabilia was also auctioned, including an archive of 24 untitled poems written when he attended the University of Minnesota, which sold for nearly $250,000; and another of Dylan’s oldest autographed photographs, which have sold nearly 24,000.
Dylan Supermarket
The verb sell is increasingly associated and branched out with a trademarked and consumable (cool) Dylan who just released a book, is about to continue squeezing his files – the bootleg series of Crazy time-, exhibits and sells paintings, opens his Museum (the Dylan Center, in Tulsa), sells whiskey, the pandemic continues in its endless roundhe pockets $300 million for his catalog and is a pioneer in placing the (recorded) song as a work of art, much like a Picasso, Santoro or Pollock hanging in museums.
The song as a work of art
A version of blowing in the wind, Bob Dylan’s popular anthem, re-recorded in 2021 and released in a single copy on a new audio technology (Ionic Disc) Topping the greatest hits in hi-fi, it sold for £1,482,000 (almost $1.8 million) at auction in September at Christie’s in London.
Sixty years later, the single that could be bought for just over a dollar – he recorded it on July 9, 1962 – was auctioned off at Christie’s in London for a record price. But it’s not the original acetate or a piece of pop memorabilia but a single disc with the new version that Dylan made with producer T-Bone Burnett in 2022.
The original of a format called Ionic disk (Ionic Disc) that Burnett developed to achieve the best analog sound quality of the last 70 years.
I listen, then I write
Just a week ago, Dylan released The philosophy of modern songher long-awaited second book after Chronicles, his memoirs published in 2004. Only this time, what the Nobel Prize winner in literature remembers is not his life but the songs of his life. At least 66 of them, a good way to keep talking about yourself while talking about others.
some small paintings
China. Germany. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. France. For some time all those countries have claimed the other side of the artist Dylan, his paintings. Retrospectum passed through there, with almost 200 paintings, drawings and iron sculptures on display.
“Seeing many of my works years after they are finished is a fascinating experience. I don’t actually associate them with any particular time, place or state of mind, but rather see them as part of a long arc; a continuation of how we move forward in the world and how our perceptions are shaped and altered by life,” Dylan sums up.
As many years before, in 1975, he explained his approach to painting. “She didn’t teach you so much how to draw as how to put your head and eyes together…she looked into you and told you who you are,” she explained about her experience learning about her. with the painter Norman Raeben, son of the great Jewish writer Sholom Aleichemauthor of The Fiddler on the Roofamong other classics of this culture.
Source: Clarin
