Harry Carter (typographer)

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Harry Graham Carter (27 March 1901 – 10 March 1982) was an English typographer, translator and writer who helped shape the study of typography. He was the father of type designer Matthew Carter. He studied at Bedales School and at The Queen's College, Oxford, where he learned several languages including French, German, Spanish and Russian, and later Arabic. Although he started studying law, he became fascinated by printing and typography, bought a printing press, and began working with type in 1928–1929 as an apprentice at Monotype.

He worked with Curwen Press, then Kynoch Press. In 1931 he and Herbert Simon published Printing Explained. From 1936 to 1938 he was a book designer at Nonesuch Press. In 1937 he helped start a project cataloging pre-1800 type specimens; it was published in The Library in 1942. His son Matthew was born in 1937. During World War II he translated Erasmus' In Praise of Folly (1942) and served in the Middle East.

After the war he worked at HMSO for about eight years under Meynell. In 1954 he joined Oxford University Press, working there for sixteen years as archivist and as assistant to Stanley Morison on John Fell (published 1967). He cataloged thousands of matrices, punches and fonts for the Plantin-Moretus Museum and helped with Dutch typefoundries. Carter wrote and edited many books and articles on typography and its history. Notable works include The Wolvercote Mill (1957); A View of Early Typography (Up to about 1600) (1969); and A History of the Oxford University Press, Volume I (1975). He held the Lyell Readership in Bibliography in 1967–1968.