Bob Dylan doesn’t talk much, but now he had to say sorry. The 81-year-old American artist has apologized to his admirers for a pricey, signed edition of his book The Philosophy of Modern Song. The ‘authentic’ signature in the edition turned out to be a reproduction, which is also used for prints of Dylan’s paintings.
On his Facebook page, Dylan expresses his “deepest regret” about the state of affairs. For years he signed books and prints of his paintings manually, according to the singer, but after “a severe attack of dizziness” in 2019 and due to the corona pandemic that made physical contact difficult, he switched to ‘autopen’, a technique for reproducing signatures by machine . He was “assured that it is constantly used in the literary and art world,” said Dylan. Nevertheless, he now calls the mechanical signature an error of judgement.
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With the statement, the singer responds to noise among buyers of the special edition of The Philosophy of Modern Song, which came out in early November. They had compared the signature in their copies and suspected that it was a reproduction, despite the enclosed ‘declaration of authenticity’. Dylan was initially silent, his publisher Simon & Schuster insisted that the books were personally signed by him. Shortly afterwards, the publisher changed tack: on closer inspection, the signatures turned out to have been set by machine. Buyers of the special edition – with a staggering price of $ 599 (577 euros) in an edition of nine hundred pieces – get their Money Back.
Machine reproduction or ‘autopen’ is a time-saving technique widely used by politicians and celebrities to sign photographs, documents or books. On the collector’s market, such books are worth much less than those with a hand-signed signature.