Sotheby’s Bob Dylan’s handwritten lyrics to “The Times They Are a-Changin'” will be sold at a Sotheby’s auction next month.Come gather ’round, people: if your cash to you is worth spending on a one-of-a-kind piece of Bob Dylan memorabilia, you might consider saving the date of Dec. 10. That’s when Sotheby’s plans to auction Mr. Dylan’s handwritten lyrics to “The Times They Are a-Changin'” as part of a larger sale of books and manuscripts, the auction house said on Monday. In a catalog listing, Sotheby’s described the item as “a sheet of unruled three-hole notebook paper” on which Mr. Dylan wrote four verses of the famous protest song in simple block lettering (which you can see in closer detail here). He later recorded it for his 1964 album of the same title. (The verse that begins, “Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen,” does not appear in the document, though a fragment of lyrics from Mr. Dylan’s song “North Country Blues” can be seen on the reverse side.)
Selby Kiffer, a senior vice president in Sotheby’s books and manuscripts department, said the document was originally given to Kevin Krown, a fellow folk singer, by Mr. Dylan, who had a tendency to toss away his lyric sheets once he’d committed his songs to memory. When Mr. Krown died in the 1990s, the lyrics were passed along to Mac and Eve MacKenzie, who hosted Mr. Dylan in their Manhattan home on some of his earliest visits to New York.
“Although he also seems to have had a capacity for dropping people,” Mr. Kiffer said of Mr. Dylan, “forgetting them and moving on, in the case of Krown and the MacKenzies, they got something tangible out of it, at least.”
If you don’t want your hopes of owning the lyric sheet to sink like a stone, you’d better have deep pockets. Sotheby’s said it expected the lot to fetch $200,000 to $300,000.