John Carter

Throughout his professional career, John Carter, 1905-1975, was recognized as one of the most important figures in the Anglo-American book world. He was known as an imaginative antiquarian book dealer, a creative bibliographer, and a stylish and thoughtful writer. In 1934, after working for several years in the London book trade, he achieved instant fame, along with his co-author Graham Pollard, for An Enquiry Into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets, a brilliant piece of detective work that exposed Thomas J. Wise, a highly regarded British bibliographer, as a forger and distributor of counterfeit publications. Although born in England and educated at Eton College and King's College, Cambridge, Carter was as well known in the United States as he was at home. His first professional position, working as a rare book specialist in Scribner's London office, involved frequent trips to the firm's main office in New York. There, he quickly built up a circle of friends including Frederich Melcher, the editor of Publishers Weekly, and Elmer Adler, the editor of The Colophon. With those useful connections he was able to publish over a dozen articles on bibliography and the rare book trade before he was thirty years old. Carter was known for his independence of thought and action, a style of behavior formed at Cambridge as a student of A. E. Housman and sharpened in the book trade through association with tough-minded colleagues such as Stanley Morison, Percy Muir, David Randall, and Michael Sadleir. He was, above all, an articulate spokesman for the pleasures and challenges of book collecting. This work will be appreciated by all bibliophiles who are interested in the world of books.