Sebastian’s writings

Alongside his work at the Rampant Lions Press, Sebastian Carter has written extensively on typographical and other subjects, beginning with editing the Christ’s Hospital literary magazine The Outlook, and continuing with contributions to Granta at Cambridge. He contributed to most of the numbers of the Whittington Press’s journal Matrix, and wrote many reviews for The Times Literary Supplement. In 2008 he took over the European editorship of Parenthesis, the journal of the Fine Press Book Association, handing over to David Jury in 2021.

In 1982 he produced the first catalogue of the Rampant Lions Press’s output for the exhibition of the Press’s work at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and now has greatly enlarged it into the complete Narrative Catalogue. In 1984 he wrote The Book Becomes, an account of the printing at the Rampant Lions Press of William Morris and Burne-Jones’s Story of Cupid and Psyche (1974), with a discussion of broader issues of fine printing.

The first edition of his Twentieth Century Type Designers was published by Trefoil (and Taplinger in the USA) in 1987, becoming the standard work. A second edition was published by Lund Humphries (Norton in the USA) in 1995, and a paperback edition in 2002.

Sebastian guest edited a number of The Monotype Recorder on Eric Gill in 1990, and contributed a section on ‘The Morison Years’ to the centenary Recorder in 1997. He is a co-author of the History of the Monotype Corporation (2014) published by the Printing Historical Society and Vanbrugh Press. He contributed a number of entries to The Oxford Companion to the Book (2010) and the ‘Format and design’ chapter for The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 7, The Twentieth Century and Beyond.