The last edition recorded before his death featured an interview with the singer Eddi Reader about the poet Robert Burns, the major focus of her creative work.

Carpenter was an amateur jazz musician who played the piano, the saxophone, and the double-bass, the last instrument professionally in a dance band in the 1970s.

In 1983, he formed a 1930s style jazz band, Vile Bodies, which for many years enjoyed a residency at the Ritz Hotel in London.

His encyclopaedic work, The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature (1984), written jointly with his wife, Mari Prichard, has become a standard reference source.

[4] A commemorative stained-glass window was installed in St Margaret's Institute, Polstead Road, honouring Carpenter's many accomplishments.