One morning in the early 1970s, the biographer Michael Holroyd was startled to receive in the post a copy of a novel, accompanied by a token for a pound of best steak from ‘George Ellerbeck, butcher of Kettering’. These, the accompanying letter explained, represented the Ellerbeck Literary Award: ‘The Prize is awarded at infrequent intervals, and you are only its third recipient. The circumstances are that Mr Carr, who makes a living by writing, is one of my customers and pays me in part with unsold works, known I understand as Remainders. These I give to better customers in lieu of my customary picture calendars. Mrs Ellerbeck, who goes to the WEA [Workers Education Association] and is not averse to a bit of literature, suggested some years ago that I award one of these copies as an encouragement to another member of the literary world, this to be known as the Ellerbeck Prize… As I store these with my carcasses they have a slight taint, and also I am told that without the jacket it will be harder to sell.’

The jacketless book was The Harpole Report by J.L. Carr, novelist, cartographer, lexicographer, publisher, teacher and cricket-lover. He had invented both the butcher and the prize, and this was just one of his ways of getting rid of remaindered copies of his books. A canny Yorkshireman, though living most of his productive life in the Midlands town of Kettering, Carr always bought back his remainders, delivering them by hand as Christmas cards; he reckoned it was cheaper. The remainders of The Harpole Report, a comic novel in the form of a logbook kept by the temporary headmaster of a primary school, were proving hard to shift – until the humorist Frank Muir appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs and chose it as the book he would take with him to the mythical island. The piles of remaindered copies in Carr’s garden shed were suddenly gone, and Carr had made a good profit.

The Harpole Report was, like much in Carr’s novels, written out of his life experience: from 1952 to 1967 he had been a primary school headmaster in the town of Kettering in Northamptonshire – and a most unusual one, who would lead his pupils through the streets at cherry blossom time chanting the poet A.E. Housman’s ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now/ Is hung with bloom along the bough.’ Despite the best efforts of officialdom, he enjoyed an extraordinary degree of autonomy as head of a primary school in a socially ‘mixed’ area – and he got quite extraordinary results, having resolved that no child would leave his school at 11 a non-reader. He succeeded in his ambition across his 15-year career, with every pupil bar one, a boy whose negative achievement so impressed Carr that he kept the school photograph in which the lad appeared, adding the caption: ‘He’s the one who resisted the charms of reading!’ When neglected children turned up at school, unusually filthy, Carr would wash them himself and return them to their parents with a note and, often, a gift of clothing or shoes. He kept the school playground open at night, and often plucked children out of their classrooms and took them off, with little or no notice, on outings to local places of interest. Then, as impetuously as he’d decide on a school outing, he gave up teaching for the life of a writer and publisher.

His great achievement as a writer was A Month in the Country, a short novel that has deservedly achieved classic status. Set in a Yorkshire village in 1920, it follows a traumatised ex-soldier, as he works on uncovering a medieval mural in a remote country church, while another veteran searches for a lost grave. It is a tale of love and loss, and the pain of the past: ‘We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever – the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.’

Nothing else Carr wrote quite came up to that, but all his novels are worth reading. Oddly, he began with the most technically ambitious of them, A Day in Summer, about an RAF veteran seeking retribution for the death of his son (this one, like A Month in the Country, also became a film). A Season in Sinji reflects Carr’s wartime experiences in West Africa with the RAF Photographic Unit, while The Battle of Pollocks Crossing draws on his year working as an exchange teacher in rural South Dakota. The first novel he published himself, under his Quince Tree Press imprint, was What Hetty Did, about an 18-year-old girl fleeing her adoptive parents to start a new life in Birmingham (where, oddly, she encounters characters from Carr’s other novels).

Carr operated the Quince Tree Press from his home. Having taken care to buy back the rights from his publishers, he would reissue most of his works in attractive Quince Tree Press editions, but the list also included Carr’s numerous ‘pocket books’. These very small, genuinely pocket-sized books – ideal ‘for reading in cold bedrooms and/or the bath’ – include poetry and prose selections, wood engravings, pocket dictionaries on many subjects, hand-drawn county maps and much else, all reflecting Carr’s own range of interests. The books are lovingly made, often surprising, and highly individual. Wonderfully, the Quince Tree Press is still in the family, and still going strong.

An interviewer once asked Carr how he would describe himself in a dictionary entry. He replied: ‘James Lloyd Carr, a back-bedroom publisher of large maps and small books who, in old age, unexpectedly wrote six novels, which, although highly thought of by a small band of literary supporters and by himself, were properly disregarded by the Literary World.’ Certainly, what the journalist Matthew Engel wrote of him in his introduction to Carr’s Dictionary of Extra-ordinary Cricketers is true: ‘There never has been, and never will be, a writer remotely like him.’