Our Book Club Book of the Month for January 2024 is Bob Dylan's Hibbing, published by the EDLIS Café Press in 2019 (ISBN: 9781091782891). In our meeting, we will not only learn about Hibbing, Minnesota, but we have a great opportunity to learn about an interesting and unique facet of the Bob Dylan world, the EDLIS project itself, the product of 1000s of individuals and a legacy dating to the early 1960s!
Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, on May 24, 1941. In 1947, his family moved to Hibbing, Minnesota, 75 miles northwest of Duluth. In 1959, Dylan left Hibbing to attend the University of Minnesota in Menneapolis. Bob Dylan's Hibbing has been called a "Bob Dylan's Origins Toolkit" which sums it up well. Anything known about Bob Dylan and Hibbing should be in this book.
Two of the book’s authors will attend, Craig Jamieson & Walter Zuk. Walter's wife Tara was a major contributor but she died in 2020, Walter knows a lot about what she did.
This fine photograph arrived too late for the book, but like many other things people send in sparked by the book, it is covered in the EDLIS Café. Bobby Zimmerman, who would become Bob Dylan, sits on the lap of his great-grandmother, Lybba Edelstein, in this photo taken in 1942. Bobby’s mother, Beatty Stone Zimmerman, stands at left, next to his grandmother, Florence Edelstein Stone. Photograph courtesy of Lawrence Goldberg.
Thanks to Laura Tenschert (Definitely Dylan) for drawing our attention to the polka dots with regard to Dylan’s 60s polka-dotted shirt!
Examples of EDLIS projects:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/edlis.cafe/posts/6497914506913693/
Olof: https://www.bjorner.com/still.htm
Son of Olof: https://bobserve.com
Art Index: http://www.edlis.org/artindex
Hardinge Simpole: http://www.hardingesimpole.co.uk/dylan/
The raw Hibbing project in real time, three photograph albums, from which the book was compiled:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1033198603476418
AND, do consider supporting this project:
www.edlis.org/donate
EDLIS, the Exchange Dylan Lyrics Internet Service, began as an Internet wide conspiracy to make available Dylan lyrics for the purposes of research and/or private study. EDLIS evolved to consist of a number of loosely affiliated individuals who have chosen to horde and distribute Bob Dylan information. The exact origins are shrouded in mystery and the subject of ancient Internet folklore. Some suspect that it was started by Hugh Brown, as a way to help him organize his vast warehouses of Dylan material, but such secrets may never be revealed. Actually, in the early days of computers, those technically inclined began to exchange Dylan lyrics on computer floppies. In 1986 the first U.K. collectors came onto the Internet and the more adventuresome of these began to experiment with this new vehicle for the exchange of information, though some of the exchangers stayed with their dependable floppies. Those who had become net aware adopted the EDLIS name, which emphasizes both the role of the Internet and the service aspect of their mission. Later the rec.music.dylan UseNet Newsgroup (often called rmd by those impolite enough to obscure things by acronyms) was formed, and it was of course of interest to those in EDLIS. Although its original focus was to provide the lyrics to Dylan songs when needed, its activities have expanded into many other areas.
Book Club member Mia Tillery was intrigued by the relationship of the book Bob Dylan’s Hibbing and the ever expanding information posted on the EDLIS Facebook pages. Using Echo Helstrom as an interesting example, here is a link to Mia’s post & the responses from Linda Whiteside & Olga Terlouw:
https://m.facebook.com/groups/edlis.cafe/permalink/7305089069529562/?mibextid=Nif5oz
Roberta Rakove found this description of Bob revisiting his boyhood home in Hibbing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvsUfw9Kf3k&t=8s
What is EDLIS? In the words of your fellow Book Club member, Craig Jamieson: EDLIS, is “a huge anarchists' collective of Dylanistas who work anonymously, attribution of who did what is rarely given. It is not secretive, it just sets out to avoid the people being more important than the content and the results. EDLIS has been described as "a hard to pin down anarchical group responsible for so little but behind so much." And all are welcome to join, something will be found to suit you. The collective began in the early 1960s and has had hundreds of projects over the years. Olof Björner's Files, as published books and online, the Dylan Pool, now in its third incarnation, the EDLIS Tape Library, a tape exchange in the early days making any circulating tapes available to any collector for free, EDLIS Lunches take place all over the world, usually on the day of a Bob Dylan Concert, the Hardinge Simpole series of books "All Alone On A Shelf", and many more projects including the EDLIS Café, a Facebook Discussion Group that grew out of the Usenet discussion group rec.music.dylan that grew out of alt.music.dylan. There are a number of indexes, the most recent is an art index of all the art objects created by Bob Dylan, paintings, drawings, welded sculptures and related things.
The Preface for Bob Dylan’s Hibbing adds this: “EDLIS Café Press books are simply information taken from EDLIS projects on the internet. They are not carefully planned academic tomes, but rather a snapshot of the state of play on a particular topic at the time of going to press, rough and ready. If you wish to improve what is here, you should partake in the project on the Internet, be it a web page, a Facebook album, a Facebook thread or a Google doc or something else” and “You will find much more on the internet, much more in terms of detail, and there you will also find many clickable links to other sources. And you will find updated information in a dynamic fashion which is not possible with a printed book. The book and the internet project work together. Things disappear from the Internet, platforms end, odd glitches can confuse. A book has more chance of lasting. The Internet coverage ranges from much more widely, goes off on tangents and includes things of interest but not central to the topic.” Craig further adds: “Facebook is a dreadful medium, things disappear, who knows what its future is, it is impossible to archive. So we thought we would start doing some books to preserve the contents of some projects. This book is the result of the Hibbing Project.”
Contributors to this webpage:
Craig Jamieson, Peter White, Mia Tillery, Roberta Rakove
Toby Thompsonm author of An Unorthodox View of Bob Dylan: Positively Main Street (1971):