Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine

Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine offers an unprecedented glimpse into the creative life of one of America's most groundbreaking, influential, and enduring artists.

"The Dylan Center in Tulsa offers a read as endlessly fascinating, as vital to the American story, as its subject himself... Whether you have inhaled this kind of information for decades, as I have, or you're a neophyte who only knows him as the author of Blowin' in the Wind or Like a Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine may fill you with as much surprise and delight as I got from it." - The Guardian

"Mixing Up the Medicine, the first publication from the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, brings the reader closer to the Dylan godhead than perhaps any publication since Chronicles." - Vanity Fair's 'Our 20 Favourite Books of 2023'

Several years ago, a treasure trove containing some 6,000 original Bob Dylan manuscripts was revealed to exist. Their destination? Tulsa, Oklahoma. The documents, as essential as they are intriguing—draft lyrics, notebooks, and diverse ephemera—comprise one of the most important cultural archives in the modern world. Along with countless still and moving images and thousands of hours of riveting studio and live recordings, this priceless collection now resides at The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, just steps away from the archival home of Dylan's early hero, Woody Guthrie.

Nearly all the materials preserved at The Bob Dylan Center are unique, previously unavailable, and, in many cases, even previously unknown. As the official publication of The Bob Dylan Center, Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine is the first wide-angle look at the Dylan archive, a book that promises to be of vast interest to both the Nobel Laureate's many musical fans as well as a broader cultural audience.

Edited by Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel, Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine focuses on the full scope of Dylan's working life, particularly from the dynamic perspective of his ongoing and shifting creative processes—from his earliest home recordings in the mid-1950s right up to Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020), his most recent studio recording, and into the present day.

The centrepiece of Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine is a carefully curated selection of over 600 images, including never-before-circulated draft lyrics, writings, photographs, drawings, and other ephemera from the Dylan archive.

With an introductory essay by Sean Wilentz and an epilogue by Douglas Brinkley, the book features a surprising range of distinguished writers, artists, and musicians, including Joy Harjo, Greil Marcus, Michael Ondaatje, Gregory Pardlo, Amanda Petrusich, Tom Piazza, Lee Ranaldo, Alex Ross, Ed Ruscha, Lucy Sante, Greg Tate, and many others. After experiencing the collection firsthand in Tulsa, each of the authors was asked to select a single item that beguiled or inspired them. The resulting essays, written specifically for this volume, shed new light on not only Dylan's creative process but also their own.

"Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine is the magnum opus every Bob Dylan fan has been waiting for since the '60s and will be a landmark publication for the ages—a lavishly illustrated collection of archival treasures... The artefacts here are full of history... Luminous." - New York Times Book Review

"The bible for Dylanologists around the world." - Le Monde

"This first major book publication by the Dylan Archive makes a large part of the books published about Dylan superfluous." - Die Welt

"A feast. This tour de force takes you page by page through the many decades of Dylan World." - Todd Freston, founder of MTV

BOOK OF THE YEAR: "This book of treasures is a catalogue of beautiful ephemera that functions as a living memorial to its subject, while also illustrating the depths of Dylan's creativity." - Uncut

"If there is anything new to be discovered about Bob Dylan, you can probably find it in The Bob Dylan Centre... Now the Bob Dylan Centre is publishing its first book, essentially the archive in miniature: Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine. It is a 608-page tome examining over 1,000 images and objects culled from the collection by archivists and curators Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel." - The Telegraph