A rare collection of correspondence from Samuel Beckett to two close friends failed to sell at auction in Sotheby's in London today.
A series of 240 letters, postcards and notes from the playwright to the painter Avigdor Arikha and his wife, the writer Anne Atik, had been put up for auction with a guide price of between £200,000 and £300,000 (€225,000 and €337,000).
A Sotheby's spokesman said the letters, which spanned three decades of the writer's life up to his death in Paris in 1989, had generated a significant amount of interest but several bids had failed to make the reserve price.
Beckett's correspondence with the Arikhas, written from Paris, Ussy-sur-Marne, Berlin, London and elsewhere, provides a rare insight into the reclusive writer's personal life.
Copies of many of the letters are due to appear in the second volume of Beckett's Letters, due to be published in 2011.
A similar collection of letters and postcards written by Beckett to the painters Henri and Josette Hayden were sold at auction in London in 2006 for €360,000.
The National Library said it had been aware of today’s auction but had decided against a move to acquire the collection on budgetary grounds.
The National Library paid a record €1.17 million in 2006 for a set of six sheets of manuscripts by James Joyce, outlining his early ideas for his novel Finnegans Wake.