Bob Dylan’s Original Typewritten Draft Lyrics for ‘I’m Not There’ Have Been Rediscovered After More Than Half a Century

For decades, eager fans could only hear the obscure song on bootleg vinyl recordings. The draft lyrics, which were found inside a first-edition copy of Allen Ginsberg poetry, just sold at auction for $6,800

Ellen Wexler | Writer and Special Projects Editor

April 22, 2026

Bob Dylan lyrics on lined paper — The typewritten lyrics were found on a torn piece of paper measuring roughly eight by seven inches. Omega Auctions

A book dealer was leafing through an Allen Ginsberg paperback when a tattered piece of paper fell from its pages. The lined sheet, torn across its bottom edge, featured a series of cryptic typewritten verses. The typist had used punctuation sparingly and capitalization only for emphasis. One segment read:

shes a lone hearted miss an she DAREN’T CARRY ON
when im there shes alright but shes not when im gone

SHES GONE
SHES GONE!!!! Like the rainbow shinin yesta-day
an now shes here with me an i want her
to stay

shes a lone forsaken beauty an she dont trust anyone
i wish i was beside her but im not there im gone

The dealer realized that these lines were the lyrics to “I’m Not There,” a relatively obscure Bob Dylan song recorded around 1967. On April 21, the typewritten page sold at auction for £5,000 (around $6,800).

“After discussions with notable Dylan collectors, it is believed that this is an extremely rare working lyric draft of what is regarded as one of Dylan’s greatest piece[s] of songwriting,” notes Omega Auctions, the British auction house that held the sale, in the lot listing.

Quick fact: Bob Dylan at the auction block

The musician’s lyrics often fetch much higher sums. For example, his draft of “Mr. Tambourine Man” sold for $508,000 in 2025. A decade earlier, his collection of drafts, notes and revisions for “Like a Rolling Stone” brought in $2 million.

The lyrics were found in a signed first-edition paperback of Ginsberg’s Ankor Wat. This particular copy features an inscription to Sally Grossman, the wife of Dylan’s first manager, Albert Grossman. Sally was close with Dylan, and she was even pictured on the cover of his 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home. After she died in 2021, a dealer purchased a trove of books, including Ankor Wat, from her estate. “It is likely that these typewritten working lyrics have sat nestled within this book since not long after she was gifted it by Ginsberg in 1969,” according to the lot listing.

Dylan wrote “I’m Not There” in the summer of 1967, when he was recovering from an unforgiving touring schedule and a recent motorcycle accident. Publicly, the musician claimed that he was taking a break from music. In reality, he had moved to the basement of a house near Woodstock, New York, where he wrote around ten new songs each week. He invited fellow members of his touring group, which would later become known as the Band, to stay with him and record songs.

The musicians never planned to release these recordings. Years later, Dylan maintained that he’d created the demos primarily so that other artists could record their own versions. But eager fans started circulating unauthorized copies—some of the first bootleg recordings in the history of rock. In 1975, Dylan and the Band finally released The Basement Tapes, an official album with 24 tracks.

The group had recorded far more than 24 songs in the summer of 1967, but the album didn’t feature many of these numbers—including “I’m Not There.” The New York Times magazine’s Robert Sullivan called it “one of the most obscure titles in the Dylan canon.” Even so, judging only from bootleg copies, fans consider it a central part of his oeuvre. It wasn’t officially released until 2007, when it appeared on the soundtrack of an experimental film of the same name.

On the track, the musician improvises “only vaguely realized lyrics against a hauntingly beautiful melody,” in the words of John Bauldie, editor of a Dylan fanzine titled the Telegraph. “The remarkable thing about it is that even though, for the most part, the lyrics are not lyrics at all, but sounds, the performance is moving, emotionally overflowing. It is Dylan’s saddest song and one of his greatest vocal performances.”

The singer improvises and mumbles throughout much of the song, and some of the words are unintelligible. “But even when Dylan’s vocals switch from a clear stream of consciousness into a murky river of onomatopoeic slurring, they still get you in the gut,” writes Far Out magazine’s Matthew Ingate.

The draft lyrics include roughly two dozen lines from the song. “Most of these words come through clearly on the recording, so the new manuscript doesn’t tell us much,” Far Out adds. It does, however, feature “one glimpse of a line” that can’t be heard clearly on the recording. This line appears on the typed page as “2 hearts mistaken / i dont far believe / its so bad / for its amusing / an she’s hard to please.”

A few weeks before the sale, the auction house learned that a copy of these draft lyrics had been uncovered in 1990, when a scanned image of the page appeared in an issue of the Telegraph fanzine. The editors wrote that they’d received it from an “anonymous correspondent,” noting that they would be “very pleased to hear again from the person who sent this in.”

Bob Dylan performing in Philadelphia in 1966 Charlie Steiner / Highway 67 / Getty Images

Dylan’s songs are famously enigmatic. As a young songwriter, he was inspired by the lyrics of Delta blues musician Robert Johnson, copying them onto scraps of paper so he could examine “the sparkling allegories, big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction—themes that flew through the air with the greatest of ease,” as he recalled in his 2004 memoir. “I didn’t have any of these dreams or thoughts, but I was going to acquire them.”

As Dylan’s profile rose, mainstream audiences found that his lyrics were unlike anything they’d heard before. The way his mumbled vocalizations merged with his abstract verses struck a chord. In 2016, he became the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, sparking new questions about the definition of poetry—and whether song lyrics could qualify. If lyrics can be literature, should they be judged as written works, removed from the context of music?

Dylan reflected on some of these distinctions in his 2017 Nobel Prize lecture. “Our songs are alive in the land of the living,” he said. “The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days.”

For those interested in heeding Dylan’s advice, the recording of “I’m Not There” can be found here.

You Might Also Like

Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.