Harry Carter (typographer)

Harry Carter (27 March 1901 – 10 March 1982) was an English typographer and writer. He was a well-known historian of type. He was the father of typographer Matthew Carter.

Harry Graham Carter studied at the progressive Bedales School (where he was a friend of John Rothenstein), and at Queen's College, Oxford "where he became competent in French, German, Spanish, and Russian". (He would later learn Arabic, and design a Hebrew font.) Though he was studying law, Carter became interested in typography, and bought a printing press.

His first work with type came in 1928 and 1929 as an apprentice at the Monotype Corporation. At this time he formed friendships with Jan van Krimpen, Stanley Morison, Francis Meynell, and Oliver and Herbert Simon (cousins of his school-friend, John Rothenstein). He became involved the Curwen Press, and after leaving the Monotype Corporation worked briefly at the Kynoch Press in Birmingham. In 1931 he and Herbert Simon published Printing Explained.

From 1936 to 1938 he worked at the Nonesuch Press in London, as Meynell's book-designer. His son, Matthew Carter, was born in 1937.

During World War II he saw service in the Middle East.

After the war he worked for some eight years at H. M. S. O., again under Meynell.

In 1954 Carter was hired by Oxford University Press, where he worked for sixteen years. He was archivist and assistant to Stanley Morison as Morison worked on John Fell, published in 1967. He also catalogued thousands of matrices, punches and founts for the Plantin-Moretus Museum, and assisted Charles Enschede with his Typefoundries in the Netherlands.

Carter was the author and editor of books and articles on typography and the history of type. Notable among his writings are:

The Wolvercote Mill: a study of paper-making at Oxford, 1957; A View of Early Typography: Up to about 1600, 1969; and A History of the Oxford University Press. Volume I to the year 1780, 1975.