J.L. Carr was the most English of Englishmen: a man who spent most of his working life in the middle of Middle England as headmaster of a Northamptonshire school an enthusiastic follower of cricket and a tireless campaigner for the conservation of country churches. But he was also the author of half a dozen of the quirkiest most comic novels in English a publisher (from his own back bedroom in Kettering) of some of the most eccentric collectable - and smallest - books ever printed and an enigmatic elusive individual. Among Carrs novels are A Month in the Country his moving story of a World War I survivor that is now a Penguin Classic - which won the Guardian Fiction Award was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a highly successful film starring Kenneth Branagh and Colin Firth; How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup now published as a Prion Humour Classic and acclaimed as one of the funniest novels ever written about football and The Harpole Report acknowledged to be one of the funniest novels ever written about a school. Meanwhile his own self-published Carrs Dictionary of Extraordinary Cricketers became the smallest bestseller ever printed. This biography tells the life story of this fascinating man - a life both surprising and varied from war service on a West African flying-boat base to a strange interlude teaching in the heart of South Dakota - and discovers a headmaster who would hold arithmetic races on sports day a mysterious individual who buried all his treasures in his garden and was someone different to everyone who met him and a novelist whose fiction is partially autobiographical.