John Carter

Who was John Carter?

John Waynflete Carter was an English author, diplomat, bibliographer, book-collector, antiquarian bookseller and Vice-President of the Bibliographical Society of London. After attending Eton College, he studied classics at King's College, Cambridge, where he gained a double first. His 1934 exposé, An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets, co-written with Graham Pollard, exposed the forgeries of books and pamphlets by Harry Buxton Forman, a distinguished executive editor of Keats and Shelley, and Thomas J. Wise, one of the world's most prominent book collectors. Forman and Wise's crimes are generally regarded as one of the most notorious literary scandals of the twentieth century. Carter also wrote seminal books on aspects of book-collecting, and served on the board of directors of the influential journal The Book Collector, published by Queen Anne Press, a company managed by James Bond creator Ian Fleming. Carter also edited the prose of the poet A. E. Housman. He was the husband of the writer and curator Ernestine Carter and the brother of the printer Will Carter of the Rampant Lions Press, at which some of his smaller-scale works were published. He was also a humorist and writer of clerihews, some of which were printed by Will Carter in 1938.