The Beckett Collection has been recognised as being of national and international importance by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council of Britain.
The Foundation’s Collection, the world’s largest collection of resources relating to Samuel Beckett, is housed at the Special Collections Service of the University of Reading Library. It contains over 500 manuscript pieces, typescript drafts and notebooks dating back to the 1930s, as well as annotated production texts, books from Beckett’s personal library and many signed editions. Material is constantly being added, both by donation and by purchase.
’Stage Files’ document over 700 international productions of Beckett’s work. There are over 1000 Beckett texts and a similar number of critical works in more than 20 languages, over 550 offprints, around 170 periodical titles, over 2500 news cuttings, as well as dissertations, audio and video recordings, ephemera, posters, photographs and paintings (several presented to the collection by Beckett himself), as well as over 600 autograph letters and large publishing collections. The archive also contains holdings from other institutions in copy, such as the 1930s notebooks now at Trinity College Dublin.
Accessing the Collection
The Beckett International Foundation’s Archive is open to all for consultation through the University of Reading’s Special Collections Service. Information for visitors, such as opening times and directions, is available can be found here.
Please note that surrogate copies, not originals, are normally made available for consultation. Access to originals is only by agreement with the Directors of the Beckett International Foundation. The Foundation does not provide photocopies of its manuscript and typescript holdings.
If you have any practical queries regarding access to the Beckett Collection, please contact the Special Collections service. For scholarly enquiries, please contact Dr Mark Nixon
Catalogues
Over 5000 items are catalogued, including all the manuscripts, and almost all the books, offprints, stage files, audio-visual media, and other printed materials.
There are handlists for the correspondence with Ruby Cohn, Jocelyn Herbert, and Pamela Mitchell.
The manuscript and typescript items are also described in Beckett at Reading: catalogue of the Beckett manuscript collection at the University of Reading, [compiled by] Mary Bryden, Julian Garforth, Peter Mills (Whiteknights Press and the Beckett International Foundation, 1998).
Supplements containing subsequent additions to the collection are available at the Special Collections Service.