Jackson was born in
Newton Lower Falls,
Massachusetts, and he began to work cleaning the bookshop and offices of Estes and Lauriat in
Boston, ten miles from his birthplace. By the age of 22, he was a partner in the firm, overseeing the manufacturing and publishing. He helped expand the distribution of the firm, but quickly became involved in other publishing ventures as part-owner or director. Jackson founded the
Grolier Society, which specialized in making extra-fine editions of classics and rare literature. The Society was named after the
Grolier Club, which had been founded in 1884 to advance the arts involved in making books and which was named after a well-known French
bibliophile,
Jean Grolier de Servières. After the split with Hooper he acquired the rights to publish the British ''
The Children's Encyclopaedia under the name Book of Knowledge''. ''
The Children's Encyclopedia'' was a 10-volume compilation of a popular children's journal of the same name founded and edited by
Arthur Mee and published by
Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe. Being an assembly of the journal issues, the encyclopedia was not organized alphabetically, but rather topically; navigation was assisted by an index in the final volume. Jackson secured the American reprint rights in 1910 after resolving some copyright issues with Lord Northcliffe,
Grolier, Inc. subsequently became a large publisher of general encyclopaedias, including
Academic American Encyclopedia, and the software
Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia. ==References==