THE MYSTERY OF ‘YOUNGMAN CARTER’: whilst looking through my collection of several hundred book jackets from the 1920s and 30s earlier I noticed numerous distinctive covers for crime fiction signed with the unusual name ‘Youngman Carter’. Little known today, it turns out that he wasn’t that mysterious for he designed more than 2000 dust jackets during his career. Philip ‘Pip’ Youngman Carter (1904-1969) studied at @christshospitalschool and the Regent Street Polytechnic. At the age of 18 he became secretly engaged to his future wife Margery Allingham - who was to become famous as the crime novelist and creator of the detective Campion. As well as designing the jackets for his wife’s books (and others such as Georges Simeon, Dorothy L Sayers, Daphne du Maurer, and Graham Greene) he apparently collaborated with her in writing them, and completed three further Campion novels after her death starting with a plot idea she had left him (it was said to be difficult to tell where he had left off). As well as being an illustrator, he was a journalist and writer of short stories. During World War II he had been promoted to Lieutenant Commander and Editor-in-Chief of army publications in Persia and Iraq and was a co-founder and editor of the official army magazine Soldier. On being demobbed in 1946 he became Features Editor of the Daily Express and then Assistant Editor of @tatlermagazine - later taking over as Editor, making the glossy society magazine, it was said, 'too good for its conventional readership'. These jackets are all examples of his book jackets that I have photographed in my album and which capture the spirit of the golden age of detective fiction, even if the books and authors are long forgotten. (I can’t claim to have ‘achieved’ much at home today but this has been a fascinating holiday rabbit hole to go down!) #bookstagram #book #campion #margeryallingham #youngmancarter #design #bookjacket #bookdesign #illustration #designhistory #vintage #crimefiction (at Brighton and Hove) https://www.instagram.com/p/CJjbyfMF9Ci/?igshid=gt99331s9la
