John Carter began his career as a rare-book dealer but is best known as a literary and bibliographic investigator and advocate of the use of modern scientific techniques in the service of bibliographical scholarship. For students of literary history his name is inextricably associated with that of Thomas J. Wise: Carter, working with his partner in bibliographical detection Graham Pollard, proved that Wise was responsible for an extensive series of fabrications of supposedly rare nineteenth-century pamphlets, and their findings rocked the scholarly and collecting worlds. Carter also helped open new frontiers in collecting, and through his many elegantly written articles and books made the world, both inside and outside the academy, more aware of what book collecting is, how it is done, and how collectors contribute to the common store of knowledge.

John Waynflete Carter was born in Eton on 10 May 1905, the son of the Reverend Thomas Buchanan...