The collection of personal Bob Dylan items and other rare collectables left behind by Minnesota music hero Tony Glover, which went up for sale in a highly publicized auction last week, has sold for a grand total of $495,000.
Boston-based RR Auction announced the final sale tally Friday without saying who any of the winning bidders are. The company had put the 169 items on sale individually Nov. 12 at a starting price of around $250,000 total.
Glover's widow Cynthia Nadler, who has yet to comment on the sale, told the Star Tribune earlier this month that she had no plans yet for the money from her late husband's trove other than to donate some of it to music-related charities. She said her primary goal was to put the items in the hands of historians and collectors who would "appreciate it as much as he did."
RR Auction representatives said before the auction began that Bob Dylan's management was made aware of the items in the collection, as was the now-under-construction Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Okla., which purchased Dylan's archives from him. Either one seemed like candidates to be among the collection's bidders.
Lovingly stockpiled at his home in St. Paul from a 50-plus-career as a musician and music journalist, Glover's collection sparked a lengthy article from Rolling Stone and interest from Dylanophiles around the world via a revealing interview that Dylan himself hand-edited — which sold for nearly $26,000, according to RR Auction.
Two lengthy and insightful letters that Dylan wrote to Glover in the early-'60s sold for even more, one at $36,000 and another at $29,000.
Glover, 79, died last year of natural causes. He and Dylan met as budding musicians hanging around Dinkytown in Minneapolis, 1960-1961, and remained friends after Hibbing's most famous son moved to New York.
The auction also included correspondence and other rare items from Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Joan Baez, Duane Allman and many of the late blues legends that Glover emulated.
[CORRECTION: A previous version of this story wrongly cited a single anonymous bidder for the auction collection. These items were sold individually.]
Chris Riemenschneider • 612-673-4658
@ChrisRstrib
